The Daily BEAST John Batchelor October 14, 2009 How Fox News Outsmarted the White House The White House's war on Fox shows its ignorance of the network's true purpose: show business. And Team Obama is giving Murdoch just what he wants. 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—not only unfair to all other networks that will become suspect, but also guaranteed to give comedy skits about Fox an attention around the globe not achieved since Walter Cronkite’s moon-landing moment. What’s worse than stupid about the conspiracy theory that Fox News is a pachyderm is that it is wrong. Fox News has nothing to do with the Republican Party or its dreary state. “We go to Fox because that’s the only place that will put us on TV,” a desultory Republican source admits. “But they don’ t help us by telling everyone that we suck.” ........... What is also wrong-headed in the Axelrod and Emanuel anxiety is that Fox News is joyously good at what it means to be—a popular platform for its advertisers. Ailes knows how to make the confusion of the news into a nervous and strangely comforting comic opera. Most of the Fox News day’s production is a reading of helter-skelter bulletins into a coherent narrative consistent with themes of super-patriotism, progress, profit, and paranoia. In the evening, Fox News becomes a variety show of cattiness, gossip, chants, and whoppers. ........... 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. 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.
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