Posted on 10/12/2009 3:24:26 PM PDT by Jean S
WASHINGTON — The White House has gone on the offensive against its critics in the press, singling out Fox News and going so far as to accuse the News Corp.-owned network of waging a "war against Barack Obama."
White House Communications Director Anita Dunn has led the charge, appearing on CNN television and conducting interviews with Time magazine and The New York Times in recent days to make her case.
The unusual White House campaign comes as President Obama faces mounting opposition to his health care reforms, growing concern over the situation in Afghanistan and a continuing general economic malaise.
The president also suffered a setback recently when his personal effort to win approval for Chicago to host the 2016 Olympics was rejected and his Nobel Peace Prize has met with more barbs than bouquets.
Speaking of media magnate Rupert Murdoch's Fox, Dunn told the Times in an interview published Monday: "We?re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent.
"As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don?t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave," she said.
In comments just days earlier to Time magazine, Dunn, a veteran Democratic Party communications strategist who joined the White House in May, denounced Fox as "opinion journalism masquerading as news."
"They are boosting their audience. But that doesn't mean we are going to sit back," she said.
Appearing on CNN on Sunday, Dunn said "the reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party."
Dunn said the White House would not be a "passive bystander" as opponents try to "tear down the president and his presidency."
"We will push back," she said.
The push back has included a blog post on WhiteHouse.gov in which the White House denounced what it called "Fox lies" and "an attempt to smear the administration's efforts to win the Olympics for the United States."
The White House blog singled out Glenn Beck, a conservative talk show host on Fox, for criticism, saying his program "has shown that nothing is worthy of respect if it can be used as part of a partisan attack to boost ratings."
Beck has been a relentless critic of the Obama administration and labelled the president a "racist" in a July appearance on another Fox program.
"This guy is, I believe, a racist," Beck said, adding that Obama, America's first black president, has a "deep-seated hatred for white people."
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said the White House may be lashing out at Fox "because the Democratic base is starting to be more critical of Obama.
"The world was expected to be transformed in approximately a month and it just didn't quite happen that way," Sabato said. "So if you're in that position and you need to rally your base, you need to find a common enemy.
"They're going on the offensive to rally the base and the base will rally to them because they hate the 'right-wing noise machine' too," he said. "Everyone needs an enemy in politics. Everyone needs a devil figure."
The White House offensive against Fox comes despite a reported meeting last month between senior Obama adviser David Axelrod and Fox News chairman and chief executive officer Roger Ailes.
Political news website Politico said Axelrod and Ailes met to discuss news coverage and the relationship between the White House and the network.
Fox, asked by AFP for a reaction to the White House criticisms, pointed to statements made by senior Fox executives to the Times and CNN.
"Instead of governing, the White House continues to be in campaign mode, and Fox News is the target of their attack mentality," said Michael Clemente, senior vice president for news at the Fox News Channel.
"Perhaps the energy would be better spent on the critical issues that voters are worried about," he said.
Clemente also noted that Fox programming is a mixture of news and opinion.
"So, with all due respect to anyone who still might be confused about the difference between news reporting and vibrant opinion, my suggestion would be to talk about the stories and the facts rather than attack the messenger ... which over time, has never worked," he said.
FUBO
You would think the White House would have better things to do, with the 0 winning the Nobel Peace Prize and all that. Just saying.
Since most Americans watch Fox news instead of State Run Media, the White House is targeting most of America, as usual.
The Fox News Channel will be luck to survive the Obama presidency. Talk radio will go too.
The Obama White House must stop the truth from being reported from all avenues possible to further their agenda.
Again, we are re-acquainted with Mr. Alinsky. #12, I believe:
“RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)”
Mr. Thinskin’s people can’t stand FNC’s resistance, and its refusal to worship the clay idol occupying the White Hut.
So the kenyan is escalating the situation- this is akin to the usurper telling his sheeple to hit back twice as hard.
They are a bunch of amoral, despicable, leftist Alinskyites.
Isolate and freeze the target- only they arent going to freeze FNC, which is the only network coming close to telling the truth. But they are hoping to at least further polarize the sheeple from the one news network that is doing its job in a reasonable way.
CNN has lowered itself to doing fact checks of SNL skits and blowing smoke up obozo’s butt. The Hut likes that, so ted turner’s old network gets credibility according to the Odinga administration.
But they aren’t complaining for the sake of complaining. This is coming right out of their Rules for Radicals playbook.
Brit Hume just responded to the scum and said “No news media ever failed or collapsed because of something a politician has to say.”
This guy is a real dildo.
The REASON their audience is increasing is because Americans are FED UP with these assclowns who are socilaizing everything they can get their hands on, destroying the economy, sacrificing MILLIONS of jobs as a result (trying to create more government-dependent workers), makings the USA look like a Banana Republic limp-wristed-loser to the rest of the world by constantly appologizing for America's previous GREATNESS, etc., etc.
FoxNews will be assaulted via every Regulatory witch-hunt the Socialists can come up with, while their State-Run-Media at the rest of the Networks continue the propoganda campaign that began almost 3 years ago, to get these bastards in power.
Yup,
but still got my shortwave radio.
Isn’t it strange that the White House never says what FNC is doing that is wrong. Or even offers corrections to ...
Just like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Chavez, Kim Jong and all would be dictators. They are not going to stop until they are run off the face of the earth. This is one game in which we cannot play for a draw. Not to sound too alarmist but if the USA goes down the Communist Dictator tubes who is left in the world to save freedom?
Of course the White House website is taxpayer funded (even by FOX viewers), FOX News being in the private sector, isn’t funded by tax dollars.
BEAUTIFUL!
The best thing that they can possibly do for our side is to do exactly this kind of thing.
Keep it up, BO!
PLEASE!
White House Spokes-Network CNN has it exactly ass backwards.
I suppose the hypocrisy of this is lost on the White House.
If anything, it will increase the number of people who watch FOX News. Drawing attention to your harshest critics is a rookie mistake.
Obama should spend more time fighting the Taliban than he does fighting FOX News. Politicians having critics is part of the game.
“Just like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Chavez, Kim Jong and all would be dictators. They are not going to stop until they are run off the face of the earth. This is one game in which we cannot play for a draw. Not to sound too alarmist but if the USA goes down the Communist Dictator tubes who is left in the world to save freedom?”
True Words!
this zer0 POS is ‘their Nixon’.
warts (his nose berry), enemy list and all.
I’ll bet Murdoch is dancing in the street. More ratings, more money.
Right ON!!!!!
BRING IT ON!!!!!!!!
Within a year America will be under communists control with King Obama as dictator.
9 months and the Obama White House is starting to sound like the Nixon White House after 5 years. What will it be like this time next year in the furnace heat of the 2010 elections? Obama, more than any other Democrat President of recent memory (including JimmyC), is a creature of the left wing of the Democrats and the political spectrum in general. By 2011, with a resurgent and far more conservative legislature, Obama might be repeating the end years of the Woodrow Wilson Administration, a helpless figurehead, wounded unto death.
The 0bama administration has tried really hard to "identify" the "leader" of the opposition, to falsely select a Republican "leader" like Rush or whomever, and they have failed.
They are now moving on to label Fox News as the "leader" of the opposition so that they can apply the "freeze, personalize and polarize" parts of the plan.
We need to ridicule this approach mercilessly.
Fight fire with fire. Out-Alisnky 'em.
LOL!!! Looks like during Roger Ailes and David Axelrod’s lunch meeting Ailes told Axelrod to go hump himself! lol!
President Obama did the right thing to ignore us. He knew that at the end, talk is cheap. So that's why we must act with arms.
You need to stop watching all those “Mayan Calendar 2012, Giant Meteor Targets Earth, The Magnetic Fields are About to Reverse” doom and gloom Discover Channel shows, they ruin your outlook.
So what if nobama has GOV funds, FNC has the PEOPLE.
On Bret Baer (sp?) Good ole Juan said something to the effect that Fox has brought up the BC issue and the “he wasn’t born in America” issue...Now, I am rarely without some Fox program or radio on, and I don’t ever recall those things being discussed...Is Juan reading FR and confusing the two?
Interesting turn of the phrase, since Anita Dunn is singling out Fox as being an opponent, that would mean that, by Ms. Dunn's own Freudian slip, all other news agencies are this administration's allies.
How do we turn this to our advantage? Why in Alinsky style of course.
EXTRA! EXTRA! Anita Dunn has just declared that all news agencies, with the exception of FOX News, are in the tank for Obama and his administration.
Agree.
Keep hammering them. I haven’t watched Beck yet today but my guess is that neither he nor the rest of FNC will back down. The only one who regularly caves is O’Reilly, but that’s because he wants both sides of the aisle to watch his show.
Yes, and it’s not the first time. I don’t miss much FNC being home every day and my 57” mitsubishi has only one FiOS channel. I would like to see proof of it happening.
No such thing as bad press....FNC just acquired another million viewers wanting to see what 0 Hussein O is talking about.
If Obama directed this attack on FoxNews, he has circumvented the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, from the Oval Office.
That’s an impeachable offense. He is challenging the civil rights of the FoxNews management and it’s employees.
He also swore an oath to protect and defend that Constitution. He has breached his oath of office on two counts.
He has not protected the states from invasion, and he is actively seeking to deny FoxNews it’s First Amendment rights.
Anita Dunn is a dingbat, along with the rest of the goof balls in the White House. Glenn Beck isn't a journalist or a news anchor. This is the genesis of the White House "Fact Check on FOX News Lies" . I think this is more about Glenn Beck than it is about FOX News.
That always works. Remember how well it worked for Clinton? Of course, Bush tried to be nice to the press and where did that get him?
Very good.
So why then don’t they just say what he has gotten wrong?
BOR wants The 0ne to come back on his show. But the rest of the channel won't back down. It's been interesting watching Fox this evening starting with Neil Cavuto.
They are the Good Guys and I think most people know it even if they don't see eye-to-eye politically on everything. The Bad Guys are the liars. Period.
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