Obama vs. Fox: The gloves are off

last updated 8 January 2015

“The White House is now fighting a three-front war,” said Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post: “Iraq, Afghanistan, and Fox News.” This week, in what was clearly a calculated move, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn gave a string of interviews accusing Rupert Murdoch’s right-leaning cable news network of peddling right-wing “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Obama will still do occasional interviews on the network, said Dunn, but as Fox is really “not a news network at this point,” but more “a wing of the Republican Party,” he will treat such encounters as debates “with ideological opponents.” Obama, of course, is not the first president to feel that the media is out to get him. But given the risk of seeming petty, and of boosting Fox’s ratings, does Obama’s attack on Fox “make political sense?”

What attack? said Steve Benen in WashingtonMonthly.com. Aside from its tongue-in-cheek “Fair and Balanced” slogan, Fox News is pretty upfront about being “an appendage of the Republican Party,” and the White House was just stating what everyone already knows. Earlier this year, a senior VP went so far as to declare Fox “the voice of the opposition” to Obama, and the network has since delivered on that promise, witha steady stream of hyped “scandals,” cheerleading coverage of “Tea Party” protests, and hysterical hyperbole about Obama’s “tyrannical” reign. The final straw, said Jay Bookman in the website of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, may have been Fox’s insistence that Obama’s pep talk to schoolchildren in September was an exercise in Maoist mind control. Why shouldn’t the White House push back against such blatant propaganda?

Because it makes Obama look whiny and weak, said John Nichols in TheNation.com. Rather than attacking Fox News, Obama should be taking every opportunity to appear on the network. “If the Fox interviewers are absurdly unfair,” it is they who will look bad, while the president would look heroic for walking into the lion’s den. I’ll tell you who really looks weak, said Jim Geraghty in National Review Online, and that’s the rest of the media. In a fully functioning democracy, it is the “duty of journalists” to make elected officials uncomfortable. Why was it that only Fox covered the ACORN scandal, or White House aide Van Jones’ long history of radical rhetoric? What does it say about the state of the press in this country that there is only one news organization the president considers hostile?