(e3mil columnist Michael Medved hosts a nationally syndicated daily radio talk show that focuses on the intersection of pop culture and politics. You can contact him at www.michaelmedved.com.)
Though it's easy to scoff at this preposterous premise, Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? drew more than 15 million viewers to its two broadcasts (so far: FOX is hoping to repeat it this summer). Fox officials report that since the show aired Feb. 15 and March 21, they've fielded thousands of inquiries asking for transcripts or videotapes of the “documentary,” while numerous callers to national talk-radio shows such as mine eagerly repeat the nonsensical allegations they watched on television. As the show itself proudly proclaimed (without ever disclosing a source for the announcement): “It has been estimated that as many as 20% of Americans believe we never went to the moon.”
According to Fox and its respectfully interviewed “experts” — a constellation of ludicrously marginal and utterly uncredentialed “investigative journalists” — the United States grew so eager to defeat the Soviets in the intensely competitive 1960s space race that it faked all six Apollo missions that purportedly landed on the moon. Instead of exploring the lunar surface, the American astronauts only tromped around a crude movie set that was created by the plotters in the legendary Area 51 of the Nevada desert.
Rather than allow representatives of NASA to provide easy answers to the silly but specific questions the program chose to raise (Why did the American flag appear to wave in the breeze when there's no wind on the moon? Why were there no blast craters beneath the landing craft for any of the six moon voyages?), Fox only showed government scientists giving an impatient, generalized dismissal to the whole inane suggestion. Meanwhile, the producers made no references to the obvious, intractable objections to their theory.
If, for instance, the moon missions amounted to an obvious fake meant to embarrass the Russians, then why didn't the Soviets say something about it? Surely, their close monitoring of their American rivals would have revealed that the Apollo flights never actually left Earth's orbit.
Meanwhile, if the entire point of the Apollo program was to show off the triumph of American technology, then why would NASA stage the disastrous Apollo 13 mission, which never made it to its lunar destination and in which three brave astronauts very nearly died?
The Fox show also fails even to mention the moon rocks that the astronauts brought back for analysis — about 841 pounds of them. Scientists from scores of nations around the world have analyzed these geologic samples and never questioned their origins from outside the Earth.
Instead of dealing with such inevitable obstacles to its sweeping conclusions about governmental fraud, the moon-hoax TV show accuses the leaders of the space program of mass murder. According to the Fox producers, as many as 15 astronauts and scientists may have been killed in order to prevent them from revealing the truth about the phony moon voyages. The show unequivocally suggests that the horrible launchpad fire that claimed the lives of astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chafee in January 1967 was deliberately orchestrated to protect embarrassing secrets.”
Were Gus Grissom and the Apollo One astronauts victims of a tragic accident,” the narrator portentously intones, “or were they intentionally silenced because they knew too much? We may never know.”
We do know, however, that the notion that the United States is so corrupt that it would burn up its heroic astronauts in the interests of public relations feeds the worst sort of extremist insanity. No wonder nearly half of all eligible American adults never bothered to vote in the last election. If giant conspiracies merely manipulate our view of reality, what difference does it make?
According to public opinion polls, a majority of Americans believe that government agencies played some role in the murder of President Kennedy — an assumption Oliver Stone powerfully advanced in his profitable but shameful motion picture, JFK. Millions of others assume a massive UFO coverup, or a deliberate plot to murder the Branch Davidians at Waco, or a devious effort to blame the “innocent” Timothy McVeigh for the government's own bombing of the federal building at Oklahoma City. Others claim that the crack-cocaine epidemic, or even the AIDS virus, originated as CIA plots to subjugate the African-American community.
So far, Fox hasn't rushed forward to exploit the suggestion by other conspiracy theorists that the Holocaust of European Jewry is merely an elaborate hoax to increase Zionist influence. But based on its disregard of all standards of journalistic integrity or corporate responsibility in its coverage of the “moon landing fraud,” why rule out such programming prospects for the future?
In the past, conspiracy theories flourished in the United States at times of hardship and conflict. An anti-Masonic movement, blaming all of the world's problems on Freemasonry, erupted during the economic dislocations of the 1830s and spawned its own powerful political party, while abolitionists theorized about the machinations of “The Slave Power” in the run-up to the War Between the States. Severe depressions in the 1890s and 1930s gave rise to further fears about gigantic, devious plots for world domination.
The past few years, however, have witnessed a period of extraordinary prosperity and relative peace — offering little basis for the dark fantasies that seem to afflict huge portions of the public. Inevitably, feverish manipulation by the mass media, rather than sociological circumstance, should shoulder the blame for the profound paranoia of the present — and the corresponding sense of helplessness and alienation.
Networks such as Fox (home of The X-Files and The Lone Gunmen, among other distinguished shows) obliterate all distinctions between a major broadcast organization and a supermarket tabloid. The pathetic program on the moon landings may represent one small step for its puerile producers, but it was a giant leap into the sewer for the rest of mankind.
