Centroids :
I have tried to say as little
about the Obama administration as possible this past year
inasmuch as I said plenty,
mostly in opposition, during the campaign of 2008.
Moreover, I'm not exactly gung
ho about defending Fox TV, primarily because
its opinion shows, specifically
Hannity and Glenn Beck, make me sick.
However, ( 1 ) news analysis
shows like Special Report are another matter,
and ( 2 ) yesterday the WH did
something so outrageous that it is necessary to
speak out. The "outrageous"
conduct had two parts, first, Barack Obama himself
characterizing all of Fox News
as the equivalent of "talk radio," by which he apparently
meant the likes of Rush Limbaugh
or Michael Savage, and, secondly, a new requirement
that the news pool at the WH,
which has included Fox along with CBS, CNN , etc
for many years, should now
exclude Fox specifically.
The other news networks did
something noble and refused to go along with the WH
edict , saying that unless Fox
was included they would not participate themselves.
In any case the WH crossed a
line that it should never have crossed, and the
utterly careless, if not craven,
characterization of Fox uttered by President Obama,
has no place in American
politics.
The following article pretty
much says what needs saying on the issue. The only thing
to add is that WH anti-Fox
policy has been just about universally condemned by
journalists of all political
stripes. The impression given is that the admin is essentially
incompetent when it comes to
understanding the media, and is basically
ignorant of the content of Fox
News, if not ignorant of other news networks also.
Billy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
![washingtonpost.com]()
Fox wars
The 'post-partisan' president makes an enemies
list
By Charles
Krauthammer
Friday, October 23, 2009
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 "green jobs" 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
they should 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 those of CNN and MSNBC 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 that 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?
[email protected]
© 2009 The Washington Post Company
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