Free Republic

By brazenly declaring war on a member of the Fourth Estate, the Obama administration is making a first-rate error in judgment. Just because White House officials, and maybe even President Barack Obama himself, don't like Fox News doesn't mean they have the right to decide that the network is — in the words of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn — “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Nor does it have the right to try to isolate Fox News by urging other networks to shun their colleagues because, as White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel put it, Obama does not...

"His father was a great friend of my father." The reference to William Ayers' father was how Mayor Richard M. Daley began his defense of Barack Obama for his association with the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist. Daley's father, of course, was Richard M. Daley, mayor of Chicago from 1955 until his death in 1976. Ayers' father was head of Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago-based utility, from 1964 to 1980. You bet they were great friends. That's governance, Chicago style. The head of government is friends with the heads of every big business, lobby and union, and together they make decisions on...

On the one hand, we should celebrate the war between Fox News and the White House. It is a good thing President Obama & Co. are angry with Fox. It means Fox is doing its job, you know, holding the Executive Branch accountable, like a real news organization. This is good news. Traditionally in America, the Fourth Estate's role has been to challenge those in power, challenge the assumptions, examine the assertions, and check for accuracy, all the while carrying both sides of the story. A real news organization serves the people, acting as a check on power by informing...

Do the major media outlets in the U.S. have a liberal bias? Few questions evoke stronger opinions, and we cannot think of a more important question to which objective statistical techniques can lend their service. So far, the debate has largely been one of anecdotes (“How can CBS News be balanced when it calls Steve Forbes’ tax plan ‘wacky’?”) and untested theories (“if the news industry is a competitive market, then how can media outlets be systematically biased?”). Few studies provide an objective measure of the slant of news, and none has provided a way to link such a measure...

"President Obama is working systematically to marginalize the most powerful forces behind the Republican Party, setting loose top White House officials to undermine conservatives in the media, business and lobbying worlds. With a series of private meetings and public taunts, the White House has targeted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest-spending pro-business lobbying group in the country; Rush Limbaugh, the country’s most-listened-to conservative commentator; and now, with a new volley of combative rhetoric in recent days, the insurance industry, Wall Street executives and Fox News"

Much to their chagrin, the Obama message makers haven't been able to put the clamps on foreign media yet. Ms. Gutmann trots out some curiously older examples of the plunge off the left edge of sanity by the LA Times and CBS but didn't provide any of the six hundred million or so she could have pulled from MSNBC or even CNN since last January. Naturally, the New York Times has become such an embarrassing tabloid that it doesn't bear much examination in these discussions any more. She does make a point about the first part of the problem in...

Isn't this interesting? On September 30, 2009, Federal Communications Commissioner Michael J. Copps delivered the Everett C. Parker Ethics in Telecommunications Lecture at the Riverside Church in New York City. Mr. Copps is perhaps best identified as he was in the Nation magazine when he authored a March 20, 2008 article there as "a Democratic member of the FCC and a former assistant secretary of commerce in the Clinton Administration."

Dear MoveOn member, All year, FOX has worked 24/7 to block President Obama's agenda—repeating lies about "death panels," promoting Tea Party protests, and whipping up fake political scandals.1 Now, President Obama is fighting back. The White House communications director said FOX is a "wing of the Republican Party...let's not pretend they're a news network."2 To draw attention to its biased coverage, President Obama will not appear on FOX for the rest of this year.3 It's about time Democrats stood up to FOX! Can you sign this petition asking Democrats to support President Obama's stance by staying off FOX as long...

Buried in the administration's multiple inflammatory statements on Fox News may be their strategy in all of this. In fact, Anita Dunn, David Axelrod, and Rahm Emanuel made hints at it in their statements. Here's the pertinent portion from Axelrod. The bigger thing is that other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way, and we’re not going to treat them that way. We’re going to appear on their shows. We’re going to participate, but understanding that they represent a point of view.

Will someone give the Obama White House a break? I mean besides ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, MSNBC, and the Communist News Network. ... On the Sunday talk show circuit, senior and senile Obamatrons implied or outright stated that Fox News was not a news network, lacked journalist credibility and that Rupert Murdoch was a child eating space alien. ... This, of course, backfired. Telling the media not to report a news story is like telling a teenager to not drink, smoke or have sex - it tends to promote what you proscribe. ... Back when newspapers were relevant, politicians routinely...

Here is video of MSNBC's Joe Scarborough telling fellow panelists this morning that the White House War on Fox News is designed to play to their two bases - the far-Left and the Washington Press Corps. Scarborough said the White House hopes to keep other media outlets from following Fox News stories in the future - stories like ACORN, Van Jones, and now Anita Dunn. Fox News has led the way on all these stories, and the White House has seen other media eventually report on ACORN and Van Jones. They want that to stop. I think Scarborough is right...

If FOX News had aired a White House infomercial on healthcare, would the White House have declared war on FOX News? If Chris Wallace had decided FOX too would run a factcheck on a comedy skit, would FOX be in the White House cross-hairs? If FOX had joined the rest of the MSM club in ignoring the Van Jones story and not aired the undercover videos of ACORN, Perhaps if Sean Hannity got a thrill up his leg over Obamamania, then The One would not have snubbed FOX from inclusion in his 5 interview-weekend blitzkrieg. But no...instead, FOX does a...

Here is video of Tucker Carlson on with Greta Van Susteren last night, where he called the White House War on Fox News "monumentally stupid." Greta said the whole thing strikes her as "silly." Carlson said he finds it "outrageous" that the White House is calling Fox News "illegitimate" when he personally saw another network (MSNBC) weep with joy on the air when Obama was elected. "I was there," Carlson said. Carlson said many Obama-voting journalists have admitted to him that "they went way too far" in their on-air support of Obama. Carlson also said "can you imagine David Axelrod...

You don’t have to love Fox News to see how dangerous it is when the President of the United States gives his staff and advisers a green light to single out and denigrate by name a specific news organization. As we surely all know by now, this is what the White House has been doing to Fox.

You are being lied to. Daily. Constantly. You, the American citizen, are subject to a constant bombardment of lies from the White House, B. Hussein Obama, his minions, and the state run media. Why? Because, they hope to bring you down. They hope to crush your enthusiasm. They desire to take away the fire in your belly that keeps you questioning what that monster, B. Hussein Obama is doing. Obama and his minions have turned on Fox News because they are a large network and they have journalistic integrity. While the rest of the cable, satellite and network news shows...

Whether Rush Limbaugh was set up in his failed attempt to become an NFL team owner, there is no doubt that he is the target of a new Politics of Hate, perfected and implemented by Barack Obama and his handlers. Obama's oratory of Hope and Change has proved to be nothing more than camouflage for a realpolitik of Fear and Loathing, his broad smile at the teleprompter just a distraction while Obama's heavies deliver a kidney punch to perceived enemies. Welcome to politics -- the Chicago way. Obama's attack on Limbaugh was conceived last spring. Politico reported then that a...

This socialist loser has every news organization in his back pocket and in his front zipper, and the one place that doesn't bow down and Lewinski him, he complains about. The guy just cannot take any criticsm from anyone. The White House goons come out and call Fox not really a news organization because their political commentators like Glenn Beck are on there. HE'S NOT A NEWS GUY!!!! He's the Opinion show!!! He's the equivalent of the OPINION EDITOR not the NEWS editor. What morons these people are. As if what the rest of the news groups are doing is...

When a liberal rag tells Obama and company they need to get ahold of themselves: The Obama administration really needs to get over itself. First, the president and his aides go to war with Fox News because the network maintains a generally anti-Obama slant. Then, an anonymous administration aide attacks bloggers for failing to maintain a sufficiently pro-Obama slant. These are not disconnected developments. An administration that won the White House with an almost always on-message campaign and generally friendly coverage from old and new media is now frustrated by its inability to control the debate and get the coverage...

The White House communications director, Anita Dunn, contrasted Fox News with CNN: Fox News is just a Republican opinion outlet, she said, while CNN is a real news network. Of Fox, she said, “Let’s not pretend that they’re a news network, the way CNN is.” She said this on CNN, of course. (In the 1990s, conservatives used to refer to it as “the Clinton News Network.”) I got to thinking. Fox has some opinionists, such as O’Reilly and Beck. Fox also has news anchormen and correspondents. CNN has those, too. One of the CNN anchors is Anderson Cooper — he’s...

This is a very good video with Hal covering everything from the sad state of the American dollar to the Administrations attack on FOX. It's about 28 minutes long and worth watching.

The White House escalated its offensive against Fox News on Sunday by urging other news organizations to stop "following Fox" and instead join the administration's attempt to marginalize the channel. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN that President Obama does not want "the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox." Obama senior adviser David Axelrod went further by calling on media outlets to join the administration in declaring that Fox is "not a news organization." "Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way," Axelrod counseled ABC's...

In the United States, we have several major news outlets. On television: ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox. There are also several national-ish newspapers (and a diminishing number of local ones): New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and smaller ones in Los Angeles and Chicago. On radio, there are networks for various hosts, but not many specific organs per se: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, are the best known hosts; the largest political network is PBS. The internet, as we all know, is all over the place. On TV, by far the largest...

WASHINGTON — White House advisers pledged on Sunday to book administration officials on Fox News despite claims by the president's inner circle that the cable network is a GOP mouthpiece whose programming “is geared toward making money.” Last week, White House communications director Anita Dunn said Fox News operates “almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” On Sunday, Rahm Emanuel, President Barack Obama's chief of staff, said, “It is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective.” In response to the criticism, Fox News executive Michael Clemente on Sunday accused...

White House senior adviser David Axelrod said Sunday that the Fox News Channel is "not really a news station" and that much of the programming is "not really news." "I’m not concerned," Axelrod said on ABC's "This Week" when George Stephanopoulos asked about the back-and-forth between the White House and Fox News.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel Sunday made one of the most absurd comments to date about the Administration's fight with the Fox News Channel. In his "State of the Union" interview with CNN's John King, Emanuel said, "It's not a news organization so much as it has a perspective.

David Axelrod, then Barack Obama’s chief campaign strategist, put it best when he told his boss: “You care far too much what is written and said about you.” That was in 2006 but, three years on, some things don’t change. Obama is President of the United States. His party controls both houses of Congress. And, yes, he just won the Nobel Peace Prize. But Obama still can’t shake off his fixation with the chief voice of the opposition – Fox News. It was the White House’s Anita Dunn who was wheeled out to declare that Fox was “a wing of...

White House communications director Anita Dunn fired back at criticism from TV commentator Glenn Beck on Friday, saying that a Mao Tse-tung quote Beck took issue with was picked up from legendary GOP strategist Lee Atwater. "The Mao quote is one I picked up from the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater from something I read in the late 1980s, so I hope I don't get my progressive friends mad at me," Dunn told CNN.

According to "Mao, the Unknown Story", a biography of the dictator by Jung Chang, the fight against the landlords was drawn up between March and June 1947 by Kang Sheng, an expert on terror tactics. "Kang told the cadres and activists to treat whole families as targets, even children," writes Chang. "He stood by smiling when village children beat up 'little landlords' as children from the wrong families were called." The campaign widened to include many people who were enemies of the Party, or of their local villages, but not necessarily landed rich...

Let's face it. Fox News runs stories that the Obama administration would rather ignore - from the sleaziness and corruption in the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to the bizarre views and actions of senior presidential appointees such as Van Jones and Kevin Jennings. Last weekend, the Obama administration declared war. "We're going to treat [Fox News] the way we would treat an opponent," said Anita Dunn, White House communications director. She claimed, "We don't need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave." The administration has begun using a government blog to...

Let's face it. Fox News runs stories that the Obama administration would rather ignore - from the sleaziness and corruption in the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to the bizarre views and actions of senior presidential appointees such as Van Jones and Kevin Jennings. With Democrats controlling both Congress and the presidency, the Obama administration is trying to squash dissent. The administration is not content with attacking critical press. It is boldly proceeding with plans for the Federal Communications Commission to meddle in conservative talk radio. It threatens insurance companies with not being able to participate in...

News that a Washington, D.C., television station, WTTG, is cutting costs by teaching its anchors to operate their own teleprompters prompts me to wonder if such an initiative will spread across town.

In the White House vs. Fox News war, I consider two scenarios likely. In the first scenario, both sides win: the White House gets a popularity spike among independents and Fox News solidifies its right-wing audience. In the second, more likely scenario, the White House looks petty and pathetic taking on Glenn Beck, and Fox News comes out on top.... In short, Fox News has nothing to lose here.

O’Reilly told Dawkins” you insist you can’t even mention it, that is fascism, sir. Was he right? Is it constitutional/scientific to insist that only materialistic evolution can be taught? See: O’Reilly vs. Atheist Author Richard Dawkins...

Those morons at Jeff Zucker's company have stepped in it yet again. It's bad enough NBC can't get anyone to watch its piss-poor network primetime shows, but now NBC is making sure the American public can't watch other networks' shows as well. (This follows an earlier report that NBC doesn't want the Jay Leno Show to book rival networks' TV stars.) The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is known for annually including "cultural touchstones of the moment" in its broadcast, from every American Idol winner since the 2nd season (a Fox show) to the stars of High School Musical (a Disney...

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". Anita Dunn, communications director, 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...

Over the weekend, White House communications director Anita Dunn announced the official beginning of the Obama administration's war with Fox News. Of course, the battle has been openly brewing for months now. Even during the campaign, Obama's team gave up on sending surrogates to the network. "It was beyond diminishing returns," Dunn told the New York Times. "It was no returns." But now the war is out in the open. "We're going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent," she told the paper. "As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we...

Sic 'em!

The New York Times has a piece on what they characterize as "intensifying feud" between Fox News and the administration. “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” said Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, in a telephone interview on Sunday. “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.”

Is Fox News Channel president Roger Ailes about to score another big name personality for his fledgling off-spin business channel? According to The New York Times television and digital media reporter Brian Stelter, News Corp's (NASDAQ:NWS) Fox Business Network is considering adding CNN "Lou Dobbs Tonight" host Lou Dobbs to its lineup. ...more...

Fox’s Volley With Obama Intensifying By BRIAN STELTER October 11, 2009 Attacking the news media is a time-honored White House tactic but to an unusual degree, the Obama administration has narrowed its sights to one specific organization, the Fox News Channel, calling it, in essence, part of the political opposition. “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” said Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, in a telephone interview on Sunday. “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...

Still no word as to whether or not PMSNBC is a wing of the DNC.

Contrary to reports, MGM has yet to sell the marketing and distribution rights of the James Bond franchise to 20th Century Fox. Claiming to be contacted directly by the studio on the matter, Film School Rejects set the record straight by forwarding MGM's denial that the taking-over story is incorrect. An official source, as reported by the site, also mentioned the studio still owns the Bond property and will announce the release date and distribution strategy in due time. Another denial came from 20th Century Fox as well. To IGN, sources at Fox slammed the speculation. They also insisted people...

Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Fox News made a deal to stop covering the birth certificate issue.

n a new post on the official White House blog, an administration official specifically names Fox News for lying about the administration's push to bring the Olympics to Chicago. "Last night Fox News continued its disregard for the facts," the post begins, "in an attempt to smear the Administration's efforts to win the Olympics for the United States." The author, White House online programs director Jesse Lee, goes on to point out several quotes from Glenn Beck, which it says are lies, and the truth behind them. ("Rhetoric: Beck said Vancouver lost $1 billion when it 'had the Olympics.' ......

Warning - Funny but VERY, VERY gratuitous use of the "F" word. Some vulgar body movements as well. (R-rated!) Please do not view this video if crude or vulgar language or images offend you.

A 13-year-old boy was attacked by a fox on Monday afternoon in a wooded area in the Twin Creeks community in Wake Forest. Jesse Frutiger said he was in the woods when the animal approached him and immediately started hissing. He said he threw a rock at the fox and that’s when the animal lunged at him

What the 'Hell" is going on with Fox News!? Yesterday, during Glenn Becks show .. about halfway through, they put Obama on. He was on Every news channel so I understand that. TONIGHT, about halfway through Becks show, Fox put him on .. speaking to some 'Black Caucus'! He Wasn't on Any Other News station! Wife and I .. To put it mildly .. Pi$$%# at Fox, Obama .. Everyone .. ARGHHHHHHH

The Scoreboard: Monday, September 21

First lady's favorite designer on FOX View article...

High ratings drama Monday night with a deluge of broadcast network premieres: >> Fox won the opening night of the fall season for the first time in the network's history. The network aired the two-hour return of "House" (16.5 million viewers, 6.5 preliminary adults 18-49 rating), the medical drama climbing 14% from last year while most of its competitors declined. >> CBS placed second in the key adult demo with its comedy block and "CSI: Miami" (13.7 million, 4.3). "Miami" was down 17%, though still beat ABC and NBC at 10 p.m. combined. "Big Bang Theory" (12.8 million, 4.6), however,...