Fox Contributors Who Weren’t Purged: Resident Birther And Resident Truther
Fox News recently parted ways with two of the network’s most high profile contributors, Sarah Palin and Dick Morris, in a reported effort to “purge some of its more controversial characters.” In prior years, Fox drew criticism for its employment of birther Eric Bolling and 9-11 conspiracy theorist Andrew Napolitano, both of whom the network still employs.
On the April 2011 evening after President Obama released his long-form birth certificate, Bolling claimed on his Fox Business program “that there is a legitimate question as to whether or not the president of the United States is allowed to be president of the United States” and said that the document had “been altered.” In a subsequent segment featuring a large-scale blow-up of Obama’s long-form birth certificate, he said that the document had “a green border that had to be Photoshopped in.”
In November 2010, Napolitano appeared on the radio show of leading conspiracist Alex Jones and said that it’s “hard for me to believe that” World Trade Center Building 7 “came down by itself” — a central tenet of 9-11 conspiracy theories — and claimed that “twenty years from now, people will look at 9-11 the way we look at the assassination of JFK today. It couldn’t possibly have been done the way the government told us.” Despite criticism from liberals and conservatives, Fox News gave Napolitano a pass.
