This Fox News recent video clip (3:05--the real stuff starts at 1:46) recounts the confrontation between ABC News White House correspondent Jake Tapper & White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. Tapper pressed hard on asking since when any White House could claim the right to define who is a a bona fide news organization and who is not. Gibbs referred to the Glenn Beck & Sean Hannity programs as evidence, but Tapper would have none of it, noting thousands of people work for Fox News. Fox News 6 o'clock anchor Bret Baier notes that CNBC lefty opinion-meisters are welcome at the White House. (As for Beck & Hannity, both openly state that their shows are opinion, and not news shows.) Moderate Democrats in Congress oppose the White House's campaign too, calling it overkill.
Charles Krauthammer (who appears frequently on the weekday 6 PM Fox news program), writes that the White House has gone too far in attacking Fox. CK writes:
The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is "opinion journalism masquerading as news." Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox "not really a news station." And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to "be led (by) and following Fox."
Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration -- from exposing White House czar Van Jones as a loony 9/11 "truther" to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health care legislation -- the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.
The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry -- finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox.
At first, there was little reaction from other media. Then on Thursday, the administration tried to make them complicit in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department made available Ken Feinberg, the executive pay czar, for interviews with the White House "pool" news organizations -- except Fox. The other networks admirably refused, saying they would not interview Feinberg unless Fox was permitted to as well. The administration backed down.
CK then links the controversy to the idea expressed by "Father of the Constitution" (and of the Bill of Rights) James Madison, who wrote in Federalist 10 that a multiplicity of factions would leaven governance and obviate the temptation towards tyranny, with everyone given a seat at the table, so to speak. Wesley Pruden sees Third World governance in Team Obama's war against critics.
Mark Steyn sees Team Obama tougher on Fox than on our enemies--think Tsar Vlad the Bad, Mullah Ahmadinejad the Real Bad:
At a superficial level, this looks tough. A famously fair-minded centrist told me the other day that he'd been taken aback by some of the near parodic examples of Leftie radicalism discovered in the White House in recent weeks. I don't know why he'd be surprised. When a man has spent his entire adult life in the "community organized" precincts of Chicago, it should hardly be news that much of his Rolodex is made up of either loons or thugs. The trick is identifying who falls into which category. Anita Dunn, the Communications Director commending Mao Zedong as a role model to graduating high school students, would seem an obvious loon. But the point about Mao, as Charles Krauthammer noted, is that he was the most ruthless imposer of mass conformity in modern history: In Mao's China, everyone wore the same clothes. So when Communications Commissar Mao Ze Dunn starts berating Fox News for not getting into the same Maosketeer costumes as the rest of the press corps, you begin to see why the Chairman might appeal to her as a favorite "political philosopher".
So the troika of Dunn, Emanuel and Axelrod were dispatched to the Sunday talk shows to lay down the law. We all know the lines from "The Untouchables" – "the Chicago way," don't bring a knife to a gunfight – and, given the pay czar's instant contract-gutting of executive compensation and the demonization of the health insurers and much else, it's easy to look on the 44th president as an old-style Cook County operator: You wanna do business in this town, you gotta do it through me. You can take the community organizer out of Chicago, but you can't take the Chicago out of the community organizer.
The trouble is it isn't tough, not where toughness counts. Who are the real "Untouchables" here? In Moscow, it's Putin and his gang, contemptuously mocking U.S. officials even when (as with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) they're still on Russian soil. In Tehran, it's Ahmadinejad and the mullahs openly nuclearizing as ever feebler warnings and woozier deadlines from the Great Powers come and go. Even Obama's Nobel Peace Prize is an exquisite act of condescension from the Norwegians, a dog biscuit and a pat on the head to the American hyperpower for agreeing to spay itself into a hyperpoodle. We were told that Obama would use "soft power" and "smart diplomacy" to get his way. Russia and Iran are big players with global ambitions, but Obama's soft power is so soft it doesn't even work its magic on a client regime in Kabul whose leaders' very lives are dependent on Western troops. If Obama's "smart diplomacy" is so smart that even Hamid Karzai ignores it with impunity, why should anyone else pay attention?
Bottom Line. Presidents who assail media critics more often than not diminish themselves and their governance. This goes double when the critics are presenting facts. Fabulists can be ignored. But it is a measure of telling and accurate criticism that Presidents open fire. With two wars underway, a nuclearizing Iran, a renegade North Korea & Venezuela, trillions in deficits as far as the eye can see, and economy whose recovery is far from certain, one would think that President 44 has far weightier fare on his plate.
Comments