Obama’s “Cold Shoulder War” with Fox heats up

You know when the Washington Post’s op/ed pages turn against President Obama, it’s looking bad. This morning, that’s what happens – Ruth Marcus takes shots at the administration;

The Obama administration’s war on Fox News is dumb on multiple levels. It makes the White House look weak, unable to take Harry Truman’s advice and just deal with the heat. It makes the White House look small, dragged down to the level of Glenn Beck. It makes the White House look childish and petty at best, and it has a distinct Nixonian — Agnewesque? — aroma at worst. It is a self-defeating trifecta: it distracts attention from the Obama administration’s substantive message; it serves to help Fox, not punish it, by driving up ratings; and it deprives the White House, to the extent it refuses to provide administration officials to appear on the cable network, of access to an audience that is, in fact, broader than hard-core Obama haters.

Of course, so as not to shock the headline readers at Washington Post, they ad Jo-Ann Armao’s “Fox should stop whining” as a counter-balance;

The last time I checked the First Amendment, there was nothing in it compelling officials to talk to certain journalists. Certainly, there are legal requirements about what information should be made public, but no one — not the man on the street, your local council member or even the president of the United States — is obligated to cooperate with reporters they think are unfair or who, for whatever reason, they dislike.

That quote is a keeper – I’m sure we’ll be able to throw that back in WaPo’s face four years from now.

The latest furor over Fox was ignited when Glen Beck dragged out some video of White House communications director Anita Dunn admitting that they used the media like an old T-shirt last year in the campaign – and the media did what it was told to do;

“Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” Dunn said, admitting that the strategy “did not always make us popular in the press.”

“Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” Dunn said, admitting that the strategy “did not always make us popular in the press.”

O’Reilly and Brit Hume discuss the White House strategy;

Of course, no reading of the morning’s news on the subject is complete without Scrappleface’s Scott Ott;

Clinton hopes to strike a much more conciliatory tone, in a fashion reminiscent of the administration’s approach to dealing with Iran and North Korea.

“We need to be willing to talk with our enemies,” Clinton said. “While we can’t surrender the high ground when it comes to this fact-checking business, there may be other areas where we can find common ground.”

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Media