White House more worried about Fox than Taliban

Last week, we were treated to a Jimmy Carter Redux when the White House announced that the Taliban was someone they could deal with in the war against terror. This week, they signal that Fox News is their biggest enemy. From Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz on his interview with Anita Dunn, the White House communications director;

I had thought Dunn might try to smooth things over with the country’s highest-rated cable news network, as guests often do in front of a television camera, but instead she was determined to ratchet things up: “The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party. . . . Take their talking points and put them on the air. Take their opposition research and put them on the air, and that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

I don’t think she was freelancing; there are meetings in every White House about what message to put out on the Sunday shows.

Dunn acknowledged that the president had intentionally stiffed Fox for this reason when he did that Sunday morning blitz a few weeks back, but added: “Obviously he’ll go on Fox because he engages with ideological opponents. . . . When he goes on Fox, he understands that he is not going on — it really is not a news network at this point. He’s going to debate the opposition.”

Engage people who throw acid in the faces of preteen girls, ignore the half of the country that oppose him ideologically. Makes sense. From Fox News;

But last week, Fox News was informed by the White House that Obama would grant no interviews to the channel until at least 2010. The edict was relayed to Fox News by a White House official after Dunn discussed the channel at a meeting with presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs and other Obama advisers.

So the millions of people who get their news from Fox won’t have to listen to the incessant whining of the Administration – that’s a plus. The REALLY funny part is that Fox wasn’t all that biased during the election;

…a study by the Pew Research Center showed that 40 percent of Fox News stories on Obama in the last six weeks of the campaign were negative. Similarly, 40 percent of Fox News’ stories on Obama’s Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, were negative.

On CNN, by contrast, there was a 22-point disparity in the percentage of negative stories on Obama (39 percent) and McCain (61 percent). The disparity was even greater at MSNBC, according to Pew, where just 14 percent of Obama stories were negative, compared to a whopping 73 percent of McCain stories — a spread of 59 points.

Since the election, Fox has peeled off from the pack that reads the news from White House press releases and covered things like the ACORN hooker scandal, the tea parties, the czars – ya know stuff that’s happening which the rest of the media won’t cover.

If I sat here all day and did the same thing 90% of bloggers are doing, how long would you read this blog? So Fox gets punished by the Administration for pursuing the news no one else will – if no one was interested, they wouldn’t watch and Fox would tank. But who is really getting punished here? Obama has voluntarily left millions out of his loop – he won’t reach millions with his message because his ignorant staff wants to throw temper tantrums instead.

Of course, this is the same path Hugo Chavez took, too.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Media, Politics