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Monday, October 19, 2009

Politics / News

Obama disses Fox News again

Posted by Mitch Perry on Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 8:43 AM

The Obama White House again dissed Fox News on Sunday, trotting out administrative spokespeople for all of the public affairs programs that dominate network news programming — with the noted exception of Fox News Sunday.

This has become a story unto itself, particularly after White House Communications Advisor Anita Dunn went on CNN last week to declare that the administration considers Rupert Murdoch's network to be a "wing of the Republican Party."

White House advisors Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod echoed those comments on their own appearances on the shows they did appear on yesterday.

Back on FNS, host Chris Wallace trotted out the network's Karl Rove to debate with former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe on the administration's escalating battle with Fox. (Video after the jump.)

Actually, it wasn't much of a fight.  Rove called it "demeaning to the  the office of the president by taking the president and moving him from a person who wants to be talking to everybody and communicating through every available channel the same, if you oppose me, you question me, if you are too tough on me, by gosh, me and my people are not going to come on, we are going to penalize you. That is just wrong, fundamentally wrong."

Arguing against that position was McAuliffe, who as most people who follow this stuff  knows, is not an insider with the administration, and is in fact best known for his intense allegiance to the Clintons.  Being the partisan Democrat that he is, he echoed the line that the other officially linked Obama folks were making up and down the dial — that Fox is not a 'legitimate news organization," but is instead of an appendage of the GOP.

The issue was also discussed on CNN's Reliable Sources, where Marisa Guthrie with Broadcasting & Cable magazine was critical of the White House offensive, saying it ultimately would never win the argument (going against the press, or one big part of the press in Fox News).  She also said it compromised and undermined one of the tenets of the Obama candidacy and brand — that is, to be a uniter.

In my discussions  with Democrats about this issue of whether a member of the party (like the president or presidential candidates) should appear on Fox, I've always encountered splintered opinion.  A lot of progressives do not believe Fox is legit.  But to others, that's not the question.  The question is: Should they appear anyway?  The issue became pertinent in 2007, when liberal bloggers demanded that Democrats back out of scheduled presidential debates previously scheduled on the home of Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.  But Fox has the biggest ratings in cable, and is not watched solely by hardened conservatives.

To paraphrase a line that Dennis Kucinich said to me in '07, "If the Democrats act afraid to go up against Brit Hume, who's going to think they can handle Osama bin Laden?"

The other line is from Broadcasting & Cable's Guthrie:  "This president will want to meet and talk with [Iran President] Ahmadinejad, but not with Fox?"

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