Right-wing talker Glenn Beck took to his Fox News TV program last Monday night to deliver a rant about how President Obama has compiled something "almost like an enemies list" and how Obama is into "silencing opponents." The president's tool of choice for this censorship? Network neutrality—the principle that ISPs cannot interfere with content.

"We are dealing with people who think they should rebel until they get their little kingdom like Satan did," said Beck. "You know what? Thanks, Mr. President, but I think we're going to keep the Internet the way it is right now. You know—or at least until people who are worshipping Satan, you know, aren't in office."

The mechanism by which net neutrality will silence Beck and those like him remains murky, but the matter is clearly of great concern.

"The FCC also says they are marching forward, marching with a boot on your throat to— announcing plans to make Internet companies a public utility," he said. "Net neutrality—the court shot that one down, but they are going to make it a public utility now."

Or again: "So now, the president wants to regulate the Internet, to help control all the misinformation out there. He is going to do it with net neutrality. Well, the court said no... So, now what they're doing is the FCC is just going to—they're going to make it a public utility. The Internet. Where are you, America, without the Internet?"

The entire segment was driven by a recent Obama speech to graduates in which the president described the challenges of "coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kind of content and exposes us to all kind of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter."

(Beck interjected, "Oh no, let's ban that!" when replaying the clip.)

"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and Playstations—none of which I know how to work—information becomes a distraction, a diversion," continued Obama.

Obama's particular remark here might sound noncontroversial, but Beck has always claimed to see the secret truth lying beneath the banal words—in this case, that Obama will use the FCC to shut him down.

It's not often that you hear about the inner workings of the FCC on cable news, especially coming from one of TV's most popular talkers. But Beck has mounted a one-man war on the FCC for the last 18 months, and he is determined to keep the "Marxists" from silencing him.

The Marxists are coming for me

Back in April, Beck railed against net neutrality, saying that "it's about eliminating traditional, constitutional points of view from the public arena. But that's not the way it's being billed. It is about stopping debate. But nobody will tell you that. It's about ending free speech. It is about Marxism."

Julius Genachowski, a former tech executive who worked with startups and media mogul Barry Diller, is pushing unfettered Marxism? The idea is risible, but Beck seems to believe that the FCC has been infiltrated by radical groups who will help to implement Obama's secret censorship agenda. Chief among these groups is Free Press, the nonprofit that pushed the FCC to censure Comcast for its P2P blocking. (Genachowski's press secretary previously worked for the group.)

"The FCC is being inundated by a special interest group ironically named Free Press, whose goal it is to limit America's free press and freedom of speech," said Beck in April. "But you see, Free Press isn't about free speech. It's about Marxism. It's about silencing dissent. Free Press is an oxymoron started by an oxy-Marxist. His name is Robert McChesney. In addition to cofounding Free Press, he's also the former editor of The Monthly Review. This is a self-proclaimed, independent socialist magazine—I don't want to call names—an openly Marxist publication. It sounds like a free press advocate so far, doesn't it?"

McChesney, a professor at the University of Illinois, certainly has no kind words for the current media system. He's been writing on the subject for decades, and sees US media outlets as "hype-commercialized" entities that distort the news. Here's how he described the problem of a corporate viewpoint in a 2009 interview:

One example of the way this prejudice influences the news is the way that the story of prisons in the United States is ignored in the press and other media. The United States has a huge prisoner population. Twenty-five percent of all prisoners in the world are incarcerated in the United States. The only countries that have ever topped us in this are nations like Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union and South Africa under apartheid. But for our papers and TV, this is a nonstory, because the prisoners and their families are all poor, in the bottom 15-20 percent of the economic hierarchy. They no more exist for the media corporations than the untouchables in India. If the prisoners consisted of half the graduating class of Yale University, it would be the most important in history. This kind of noncoverage undermines the most fundamental tenets of journalism. Another classic example is the way trade issues are covered in the US press: trade agreements almost always are portrayed as tremendously beneficial. Anyone who covers this story in a different way is considered an absolute fool or primitive. In actuality, trade deals, negotiated under the direct guidance of monopolistic firms, are tremendously complicated, with thousands of specific exceptions tailored to corporate needs. What you get in the press is corporate propaganda 101. If you read the news media, you think that the business world is run by genius entrepreneurs.

These sound like legitimate points of media criticism, but Beck picks up more colorful statements like this one from 2009: "Advertising is commercial propaganda; or, as the great critic James Rorty put it in the 1930s: 'advertising is our master’s voice.' Advertising is the voice of capital. We need to do whatever we can to limit capitalist propaganda, regulate it, minimize it, and perhaps even eliminate it."

McChesney makes such statements on a regular basis. In the same interview, he railed against the telcos and cable companies.

They are not any good at the actual business of telecommunications service provisioning. In the realm of Internet service provision, the telephone and cable companies play a parasitic and negative role. They do nothing positive. Their future is predicated on their ability to privatize the Internet and force people to use their version of it and pay exorbitant highway robbery prices for that use. This applies to cell phones companies as well. All of these firms rank in the bottom five of the most hated industries in the country, with the banks and other predatory lenders... At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.

McChesney favors much more public financing of media, which he sees as essential to democracy. He also wants the Internet to become "a public utility," which is apparently where Beck got the idea that he now ascribes to the FCC. (The current push to apply a handful of "Title II" rules to the ISP industry has nothing to do with making them into some sort of public utility.)

"We want an Internet where you don’t have to have a password and that you don’t pay a penny to use," said McChesney. "It is your right to use the Internet. The benefits of a public Internet are numerous. It would end the digital divide, which remains a very serious problem in the US and worldwide."