The White House disabused everyone of the notion that the attack on Fox News Channel was just sword rattling on Thursday when they attempted to get the cooperation of the rest of the news organizations in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department announced that they would make the new pay czar, Ken Feinberg, available for interviews with the White House media pool… except for Fox
This was the LAST STRAW for the other networks. With the exception of a pointed question at a White House briefing this week by Jake Tapper, an ABC News correspondent, about the administration’s treatment of “one of our sister organizations.” the Main Stream Media (aka Marginal Sycophant Media) had only made a few lame observations and objections to Obama Administration’s attempts to marginalize and ostracize Fox News… (along with anyone else that dared to question or criticize the administration or any of its policies.)
The White House has not made any secret of its deliberate campaign to squash any significant dissent. The other media’s objections, thus far, has probably been half-hearted since Fox’s ratings so far out distances the others (more than CNN and MSNBC combined) that they probably couldn’t get themselves too enthusiastic about defending Fox, hoping, perhaps secretly, that Fox might be brought down a few notches.
But the LAST STRAW came when the White House’s attempt to involve the other medias in treating Fox like a ‘wanna be’ escalated to an actual boycott. To their credit, the other networks finally found their cajones and stood against the tactic and told the White House that if Fox News was excluded, none of them would participate. The White House backed down.
I saw the following video a few days ago… it is creepy how much it makes me think about ObamaNation. Now even more so…
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Behind the War Between White House and Fox by Jim Rutenberg
“ Speaking privately at the White House on Monday with a group of mostly liberal columnists and commentators, including Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert of The New York Times, Mr. Obama himself gave vent to sentiments about the network, according to people briefed on the conversation.
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Then, in an interview with NBC News on Wednesday, the president went public. “What our advisers have simply said is that we are going to take media as it comes,” he said. “And if media is operating, basically, as a talk radio format, then that’s one thing. And if it’s operating as a news outlet, then that’s another.”
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The first real shot from the White House, however, came when aides excluded “Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace” — which they had previously treated as distinct from the network — from a round of presidential interviews with Sunday morning news programs in mid-September.
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“We simply decided to stop abiding by the fiction, which is aided and abetted by the mainstream press, that Fox is a traditional news organization,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the deputy White House communications director. Later that week, White House officials said, they noticed a column by Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The Times, in which Jill Abramson, one of the paper’s two managing editors, described her newsroom’s “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” The Washington Post’s executive editor, Marcus Brauchli, had already expressed similar concerns about his newsroom. ”
White House Tactics Go Too Far By Charles Krauthammer
Outfoxing Obama by Nicolle Wallace
“ So much for post-partisan politics. Team Obama’s attacks on Fox News are petty and childish. Top Bush strategist Nicolle Wallace on why the White House war on cable is backfiring badly.
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I watched Week One of Obama’s war on Fox and concluded that it was a win-win. Fox News saw its already sky-high ratings soar, and the White House had something to talk about other than the growing gap between Obama’s personal approval numbers and support for his agenda. But Week Two of Obama’s Fox News offensive doesn’t seem to be going so well for the White House.
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It’s tricky for a president who promised an end to childish things to single out one network watched by millions of Americans from across the political spectrum for ridicule. To suggest that the reporters, producers, and anchors at Fox News are not part of a news-gathering enterprise is confusing. The reasoning they’ve provided goes something like this: Fox News features some opinion programming, therefore the entire network should not be classified as a news-gathering operation. It is, in the words of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, an “arm of the Republican Party.”
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Assume, for a moment that this is true, and apply the White House standard to MSNBC, a news network that also features some opinion programming. Going by the White House definition of a news-gathering operation, it stands to reason that the heavily opinionated prime-time shows hosted by Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow would put MSNBC into the same category as Fox News. No Republicans are making this argument, but Obama would have been better off if he’d singled out opinion shows on both sides of the ideological spectrum. It would have allowed him to attack Fox News from a principled and bipartisan position. By singling out Fox News, he looks thin-skinned, political, and petty.
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Besides, isn’t the president too busy to watch Fox? Even Democrats have fretted publicly that Obama may have bitten off more than he can chew by trying to fix an economic crisis, wage a multi-front war, and fix health care all at once. Where does he find time to worry about Sean Hannity?
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At a time when there are too many unemployed Americans looking for work, seeking re-training or trying to save their homes from foreclosure, there’s a dangerous vanity in President Obama appearing too focused on his own press. Instead of ushering in a post-partisan era, the Obama White House seems intent on doubling down on all the alleged sins of the Bush years by putting politics front and center—and offering no apologies for doing so. ”
Nicolle Wallace served as a senior adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign from May to November 2008. She served President George W. Bush as an assistant to the president and director of communications for the White House, as well as communications director for President Bush’s 2004 campaign
“ After David Axelrod sneaked into Roger Ailes’ office in New York to powwow on Sept. 30, the White House brain trust of David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel decided that it is shrewd and useful to attack Fox News as a Republican tool—or as White House Communications Director Anita Dunn remarked, as “a wing of the Republican Party.” It is a guess that the president is not annoyed by this tactic. It is a better guess that the White House has not had a chance, in its custard pie-throwing glee, to pause and consider why this is a stupid idea—
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The worst mistake Axelrod and Emanuel are making by confusing Fox News with the Republican Party is that they are confusing campaigning with entertaining and then letting this mistake blind them to the fact that the White House is for governing, not just staging.
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Fox News is not in the news business; it’s in show business. The Republican Party, like its blood kin the Democratic Party, is in the campaign business. The White House is in the government business, though, from the evidence so far, it doesn’t know how to break out of the campaign business. ”
Why the White House Bullies Fox by Tucker Carlson
The official White House position is that the rest of the media should join Team Obama in ostracizing a news outlet that the White House doesn’t like. This raises several obvious questions:
- Since when does the federal government get to make programming decisions, much less decide what is and what is not a legitimate news organization?
- Where did political consultants—people who spend their lives lying to reporters—get the moral standing to make pronouncements about journalistic ethics?
- When did liberals agree it was OK to use government power to muzzle opinions they don’t agree with?
- And, most of all, when did the press decide to go along with all of this?
Two weeks after 9/11, then-press secretary Ari Fleischer was questioned about Bill Maher’s remark that American pilots were “cowards” for “lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.” Fleischer’s response included this line: “People need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” The response from the media was immediate and severe. Fleischer was widely denounced as an authoritarian. The words will follow him to his obituary.
Eight years later, the two most senior members of the White House staff attempt to bully a news outlet into silence, and hardly anyone in the press says a word. It was two days before Robert Gibbs got a significant question on the subject at one of the daily briefings (from, needless to say, the fearless Jake Tapper of ABC). Gibbs in effect ignored it.
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Some journalists dropped the pretense entirely, openly taking the side of the White House against their colleagues. Longtime Slate editor Jacob Weisberg wrote a piece for Newsweek in which he argued that journalists have an “ethical” obligation to join Obama’s campaign against Fox.
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Meanwhile, the same White House that had just finished lecturing working journalists on the superiority of straight news coverage hosted a secret, off-the-record briefing for Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. The two, along with several other liberal commentators, spent more than two hours with Obama.
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Why is the press corps giving the White House a pass for behavior it never would have tolerated from other administrations? Conservatives believe it’s simple bias. They point to the more than a dozen journalists who have quit their jobs to work for Obama, or to the network employees who wept with joy in public the night he was elected.
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Except the Obama people aren’t at war with Fox because it’s conservative. They’re angry because Fox has embarrassed them. Its correspondents ask hard questions. Its primetime hosts got Van Jones fired from the White House by exposing him as a 9/11 denier. If Keith Olbermann had done the same thing—and don’t hold your breath—David Axelrod might be denouncing MSNBC this week. Politics is seldom as ideological as it seems.
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Which is something the White House press corps ought to keep in mind as it stands by in silence while Fox is bullied: Your politics won’t save you. You’ll be next.
Republic of Loriland 
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