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In the 2004 election it would be Fox News Channel, in particular, that joined the drumbeat for a group of Vietnam veterans determined to undermine any chance Democratic Senator John Kerry had of defeating incumbent George W. Bush.

On May 4 the group held a news conference questioning Kerry’s war record in Vietnam, calling Kerry’s character into serious question, and challenging his military expertise, one of his more significant qualifications for the job. They called themselves the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and began running attack ads on August 5 in which 13 veterans said essentially that the Democratic presidential nominee was lying about his military record. They claimed that Kerry had lied to get two of his three Purple Hearts. Over the course of 2004, the majority of the group’s donations came from three wealthy Texan businessmen, each of whom had previously contributed to numerous Republican candidates.

“The group is devoted to calling Kerry’s war record into question, particularly with regard to the length of his tour of duty and the nature of the injuries for which he received three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star,” according to SourceWatch, a site sponsored by the generally liberal Center for Media and Democracy. “It has also questioned claims by Kerry that he was sent on an illegal mission to Cambodia in December of 1968.”

Several different news organizations investigated the Swift Boat veterans’ claims, and they were largely disproved or found to be unsubstantiated. But the damage was done. The perception lingered that Kerry had been dishonest about his war record, and the issue had become so muddled that few were clear on where the truth lay.

Fox News Channel and its managing editor, Brit Hume, jumped onto the Swift Boat veteran’s attack early on. In August 2004, Hume said on Fox News Sunday that the veterans’ book “is a remarkably well-done document. It is full of detail. It is full of specifics. The charges that are being made of Kerry, of irresponsible and indeed in some cases mendacious conduct in his service in Vietnam, are made by people who were there.”

But not every person who was there agreed. None of those in the attack ad actually had served on the boat Kerry commanded, according to factcheck.org, which monitors campaign ads. Army Special Forces Lieutenant Jim Rassmann was there. Kerry, a wounded Swift Boat officer, had plucked him out of the water when they were under attack. Rassmann wrote an account of the rescue in The Wall Street Journal on August 10, 2004. “This smear campaign has been launched by people without decency,” said Rassmann, who identified himself as a Republican. “Their new charges are false; their stories are fabricated, made up by people who did not serve with Kerry in Vietnam.”

Even Kerry’s opponent, George W. Bush, criticized the ads, saying there was no place for them on the air. Fox News said it wouldn’t run one of the ads, but that didn’t stop the network from discussing it. On September 21 and 22, all or some part of the ad was run on six different Fox shows.

Hume didn’t think the issue was getting the traction with the media that it should. In a September 2004 interview with Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, Hume explained why Fox News’s Special Report with Brit Hume had given so much time to the group’s allegations. “We thought it was a totally legitimate story and found it an appalling lapse by many of our competitive news organizations that were treating that story like it was cancerous,” Hume said.

“I think in 2004 Fox played a significant role in the election with the Swift Boat,” said Cohen. “If you have one TV network hammering away and turning a war hero into a wimp and someone who wants to weaken national security, and that network has 2 million viewers in primetime, that can have an impact on a state like Ohio that is evenly divided.”

It’s not just liberals like Cohen who believe the Swift Boat veterans played a key role in doing Kerry in. “President Bush may be celebrating victory today, but he owes it to a group he never acknowledged during the campaign,” said Joseph Farah, editor of right-leaning WorldNetDaily.com on November 3, 2004. “I’m talking about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. They are responsible for keeping Bush in the White House — or, more precisely, keeping John Kerry from snatching it from him. There is not a doubt in my mind this was the difference in the race.”

Eric Burns moderated Fox News Watch from 1998 to 2008, watching Fox News grow and stretch. He says the attention that Fox gave the Swift Boat veterans was unprecedented during his tenure. “The degree of repetition that story was on Fox News was astonishing,” said Burns. “I don’t think in all my time there, I don’t remember Fox being as influential on any other story to that extent as it was on the Swift Boat story. I think Fox needed to grab on to this because Bush had an undistinguished first term and he had gotten us into a war. In the early going, you may not recall, but there was no confidence whatsoever that Bush was going to have a second term.”

Kerry’s mistake, he now says, was that he didn’t fight back sooner. “I think the bigger problem was the campaign should have spent more money putting the truth out there,’’ Kerry told the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Massachusetts, in November 2007. “I think there was an assumption that it was out there, it was sufficiently out there.’’

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Barack Obama’s battle with Fox News began long before he became his party’s presumptive nominee. The spark was lit by the online political magazine, Insight, a subsidiary of the right-leaning Washington Times, which is owned by Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. On January 17, 2007, Insight published an article that succeeded, with the help of Fox News, in convincing many people that Obama is Muslim. Here’s how it began:

Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?

This is the question Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s camp is asking about Senator Barack Obama.

An investigation of Mr. Obama by political opponents within the Democratic Party has discovered that Mr. Obama was raised as a Muslim by his stepfather in Indonesia. Sources close to the background check, which has not yet been released, said Mr. Obama, 45, spent at least four years in a so-called Madrassa, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia.

“He was a Muslim, but he concealed it,” the source said. “His opponents within the Democrats hope this will become a major issue in the campaign.”

There was not a single named source in the story, but Fox News picked up the allegations nonetheless: A presidential candidate was a Muslim. Rather quickly, Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy was asking, “Why didn’t anybody ever mention that that man right there was raised — spent the first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father — as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa?”

His co-host Brian Kilmeade responded: “Well, he didn’t admit it. I mean that’s the issue.” Later that day, Fox News host John Gibson repeated the unverified story.

Obama didn’t admit it simply because it was not true. Obama did not attend a madrassa when he was living with his mother and stepfather in Indonesia. In addition, Fox & Friends (unlike the Insight article) confused Obama’s stepfather with his Kenyan-born father, who left the family when Barack Obama was two years old, and so could not and would not have raised his son as a Muslim, in Indonesia or anywhere else.

On January 22, 2007, CNN thoroughly debunked the “Obama is a Muslim” story, even sending a reporter to Jakarta, where he found that the school Obama attended for two years was non-sectarian and certainly not a madrassa.

“All the claims about Senator Obama’s faith and education raised in the Insight magazine story and repeated on Fox News are false,” according to a memo the Obama campaign sent on January 24, 2007. “To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago.”

But it was too late. By August 2007, a CBS News poll asked about Obama’s faith. Seven percent of Americans said he was Muslim, and only 6 percent correctly identified him as Protestant. In March 2008, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed that 13 percent of registered voters thought Obama was a Muslim. Of course, there would be nothing wrong with Obama being a Muslim. But he’s not, and critics believe that Fox News and other conservative news outlets subtly push that idea because there’s still a great deal of prejudice against Muslims in America.

“Our data shows that only 34 percent of Americans say that they have no prejudice against Muslims,” Dalia Mogahed, of the Gallup polling organization, told NPR in April. “That figure compares to 74 percent who say they have no prejudice against Jews. So while anti-Semitism is certainly not a relic of the past, anti-Muslim sentiment is at an alarmingly high rate right now in America, and because of that it’s used as a political tool against politicians.”

The power of the falsehood about Obama’s religion is a potent example of how Fox News affects today’s media ecosystem, and why a network with a relatively small viewership remains a key player in a system that feeds the mainstream media. Hundreds of stories about Fox News incorrectly reporting that Obama was a Muslim were reported by mainstream outlets.

Fox News also occasionally and gratuitously refers to Obama by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, which is, of course, accurate, but use of his middle name subtly feeds the idea that Obama is a Muslim since the name Hussein is both tied to Saddam Hussein and is as common in Arab countries as Jones is in the United States.

* On January 27, 2008, on FNC’s Hannity’s America, guest Bill Cunningham, a conservative radio host, repeatedly called him Barack Hussein Obama.
* On February 26, Cunningham, on Hannity & Colmes, used Obama’s middle name seven times.
* On June 9, Steve Doocy said on Fox & Friends: “Meanwhile, the John McCain campaign has already said, look, Barack Obama is a guy who throughout history has raised taxes. Under a Barack Hussein Obama administration, you will wind up with higher taxes.”

On March 16, 2008, Fox News Sunday’s host Chris Wallace, in an attempt to embarrass Obama into being on his show, began an on-air countdown clock that displayed the hours, minutes, and seconds that had elapsed since Obama had promised to appear on his show. On April 26, a persistent Wallace got his interview.

“And hello again from Fox News in Washington,” began Wallace on the next morning’s show. “Well, as most of you know, six weeks ago we started something called the ‘Obama Watch,’ the amount of time that had passed since the senator promised me he would come on Fox News Sunday. It has been 772 days, but now it’s time to stop the clock. Yesterday, we traveled to Indiana for an exclusive “Choosing the President” interview with the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. We caught up with Obama after a rally at a high school in Marion, Indiana.”

The hour-long interview ended with Wallace telling Obama, “Don’t be a stranger.”

Fox News has continued to occasionally question Obama’s patriotism, questioning why he didn’t wear an American flag pin, even though the other presidential candidates often didn’t, and questioning whether he puts his hand over his heart when singing “The Star Spangled Banner” — an issue that failed to dog any other Democratic or Republican candidate. Obama, by his actions, including his explanation that wearing a flag pin had become “a substitute for . . . true patriotism,” had arguably raised these questions, but Fox seemed especially eager to pursue them.

And Fox News seems unwilling to try to dispel the notion that Obama is a Muslim. On June 16, 2008, Hume, a longtime former ABC reporter, said on his show Special Report, that Malik Obama, the senator’s half brother in Kenya, had told The Jerusalem Post that “if elected his brother will be a good president for the Jewish people, despite his Muslim background.”

But that turns out not to be true, according to Jake Tapper of ABC News. Tapper listened to Malik Obama’s interview with Israel Army Radio, the actual source for The Jerusalem Post story. In the interview, Malik said, “I don’t think Israel should worry too much, you know, about the connection, because I am a Muslim myself, and I don’t think that my being a Muslim has got anything to do with my brother being the president of the United States.”

“It may be that the Israeli Army Radio interviewer asked about Obama having a ‘Muslim background,’” Tapper wrote on his blog, which fact-checks political information. “But even if the interviewer did, Malik did not say that or come close to saying that. It could be that the interviewer used the phrase, and Malik interpreted that in a way that squares with the Obama campaign’s story — that Obama’s father was a largely secular man born Muslim. We don’t know. But nowhere in there does Malik expressly say anything about Obama having a Muslim background.”

Despite all the controversy, even the Democrats still seem intent on engaging Fox News and its viewers. Following a meeting with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes earlier this summer, Barack Obama is scheduled to appear on The O’Reilly Factor this Thursday, September 4.