Obama's losing war against Fox News

NY Times:

Late last month, the senior White House adviser David Axelrod and Roger Ailes, chairman and chief executive of Fox News, met in an empty Midtown Manhattan steakhouse before it opened for the day, neutral ground secured for a secret tête-à-tête.

Mr. Ailes, who had reached out to Mr. Axelrod to address rising tensions between the network and the White House, told him that Fox’s reporters were fair, if tough, and should be considered separate from the Fox commentators’ skewering the president nightly, according to people briefed on the meeting. Mr. Axelrod said it was the view of the White House that Fox News had blurred the line between news and anti-Obama advocacy.

What both men took to be the start of a frank but productive dialogue proved, in retrospect, more akin to the round of pre-Pearl Harbor peace talks between the United States and Japan.

By the following weekend, officials at the White House had decided that if anything, it was time to take the relationship to an even more confrontational level. The spur: Executives at other news organizations, including The New York Times, had publicly said that their newsrooms had not been fast enough in following stories Fox News had been heavily covering through the summer and fall, to the White House’s chagrin — namely, the focus on past statements and affiliations of the White House adviser Van Jones that ultimately led to his resignation and questions surrounding the community activist group Acorn.

At the same time, Fox News had continued a stream of reports that rankled White House officials and liberal groups that monitor its programming for bias.

Those reports included a critical segment on the schools safety official Kevin Jennings, with the on-screen headline “School Czar’s Past May Be Too Radical”; urgent news coverage of a video showing schoolchildren “singing the praises, quite literally, of the president,” which the Fox News contributor Tucker Carlson later called “pure Khmer Rouge stuff”; and the daily anti-Obama salvos from Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

There followed, beginning in earnest more than two weeks ago, an intensified volley of White House comments describing Fox as “not a news network.”

“It was an amalgam of stories covered, and our assessment of how others were dealing with those stories, that caused us to comment,” Mr. Axelrod said in describing the administration’s thinking.

The subsequent heated back-and-forth between the White House and Fox News has brought equal delight to Fox’s conservative commentators, who revel in the fight, and liberal Democrats, who have long characterized the network as a purveyor of right-wing propaganda rather than fact-based journalism.

Speaking privately at the White House on Monday with a group of columnists and commentators, including Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert of The New York Times, President Obama himself gave vent to sentiments about the network, according to people briefed on the conversation.

Then, in an interview with NBC News on Wednesday, Mr. Obama went public. “What our advisers have simply said is that we are going to take media as it comes,” he said. “And if media is operating, basically, as a talk radio format, then that’s one thing. And if it’s operating as a news outlet, then that’s another.”

In a sign of discomfort with the White House stance, Fox’s television news competitors refused to go along with a Treasury Department effort on Tuesday to exclude Fox from a round of interviews with the executive-pay czar Kenneth Feinberg that was to be conducted with a “pool” camera crew shared by all the networks. That followed a pointed question at a White House briefing this week by Jake Tapper, an ABC News correspondent, about the administration’s treatment of “one of our sister organizations.”

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There is more.

Jim Rutenberg does a clever job of exposing the administration's complaint against Fox and at the same time repeating the stories Obama does not like. It is yet another example of how the administration's media strategy is backfiring.

Clearly, the administration would like to see Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity either removed or toned down. Worse it would like for the network to stop reporting stories that embarrass the White House. In the process it has driven up the ratings of the network as a whole.

The Obama administration will soon understand that it cannot control the news whether it is on Fox or the front page of the NY Times. No matter how liberal some of the media may be they treasure their independence.

One of the likely results of this fight is that those who see themselves as whistle blowers are likely to go to Fox now rather than there more liberal competitors. This will especially be the case if the liberal outlets were to go along with Obama's wishes that they not cover embarrassing stories that Fox reveals first. I just do not see the NY Times and Washington Post making the mistake of sending all those scopes to Fox. Those kind of stories are far too important to those papers own survival, and they both plan on being around long after Obama is gone.