By: John Rossomando Fox News seems to enjoy being on the White House's enemies list.
A festering enmity between the Obama administration and the cable network boiled over Sunday when The New York Times quoted White House communications director Anita Dunn as saying of Fox: “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent.”
Fox Senior Vice President for News Michael Clemente fired back at what he called the White House’s “attack mentality.”
“Perhaps the energy would be better spent on the critical issues we are worried about,” Clemente said in a statement the network issued.
If Fox’s ratings are any clue, the administration’s attacks seem to be having the opposite of their desired effects. As of last week, the network has averaged 1.2 million viewers throughout the year, up from around 1 million viewers a year ago. This surpasses the network’s previous viewership record of 1.1 million viewers, which was set in 2003, the year the war began in Iraq.
In June, President Obama attacked Fox without mentioning it by name, saying it was devoted entirely to attacking his administration and that its coverage of his actions were all negative.
“Every time they [attack], our ratings go up,” Bill Shine, Fox’s senior vice president for programming, told the Times.
A Fox executive who declined to be identified said the attacks could solidify the network’s base. He quoted Fox Chairman Roger Ailes as having said: “Don’t pick a fight with those who like to fight.”
Rule of thumb......ya don't pick a fight with the people who have the largest bottle of ink. Even cnn and msnbc are saying that! I readthat Lou Dobbs from cnn (I think it's cnn ) is now in talks with FOX. He may be a flip flopper!
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
What would be interesting about that transition. Dobbs is an arrogant Conservative. Perfect for FOX. He was PO because he was passed over for anchor on one of the mainstream news shows. Stick him on FOX--that can only improve CNN.
What would be interesting about that transition. Dobbs is an arrogant Conservative. Perfect for FOX. He was PO because he was passed over for anchor on one of the mainstream news shows. Stick him on FOX--that can only improve CNN.
And you're an arrogant liberal ..... (can't use the last word I wanted to)
It's obvious you have a deep seated contempt for anything conservative or liberal ... I along with others are fighting for what's right and to fix what's wrong - not for one parties particular ideology.
Oh my,,,,you two are like family at Thanksgiving......
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
Fox Wars The Obama administration wants to delegitimize any significant dissent.
By Charles Krauthammer
Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster. Now he’s put a horse’s head in Roger Ailes’s bed.
Not very subtle. And not very smart. Ailes doesn’t scare easily.
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.
This was an important defeat because there’s a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they’re engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
There’s nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.
Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand “the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties.” They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other — and an otherwise imperious government.
Factions should compete, but also recognize the legitimacy of other factions and, indeed, their necessity for a vigorous self-regulating democracy. Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimize, and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian.
But didn’t Teddy Roosevelt try to destroy the trusts? Of course, but what he took down was monopoly power that was extinguishing smaller independent competing interests. Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical — and that doesn’t even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.
Fox and its viewers (numbering more than CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined) need no defense. Defend Fox compared to whom? To CNN — which recently unleashed its fact-checkers on a Saturday Night Live skit mildly critical of President Obama, but did no checking of a grotesquely racist remark CNN falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh?
Defend Fox from whom? Fox’s flagship 6 o’clock evening news out of Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I’m not on.) Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She’s been attacked for extolling Mao’s political philosophy in a speech at a high-school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one’s own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?
The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?
Logged
) is now in talks with FOX. He may be a flip flopper!
