White House bullies and Fox
...But, they do not have to worry about Olbermann. He seems to get most of his material from Kos. Ann Coulter skewers a recent piece he did on Willie Horton where he gets the original ad wrong on the issue of race (the ad used whites in stead of blacks to play the Horton character).The official White House position is that the rest of the media should join Team Obama in ostracizing a news outlet that the White House doesn’t like. This raises several obvious questions:
Since when does the federal government get to make programming decisions, much less decide what is and what is not a legitimate news organization?
Where did political consultants—people who spend their lives lying to reporters—get the moral standing to make pronouncements about journalistic ethics?
When did liberals agree it was OK to use government power to muzzle opinions they don’t agree with?
And, most of all, when did the press decide to go along with all of this?
Two weeks after 9/11, then-press secretary Ari Fleischer was questioned about Bill Maher’s remark that American pilots were “cowards” for “lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.” Fleischer’s response included this line: “People need to watch what they say, watch what they do.”
The response from the media was immediate and severe. Fleischer was widely denounced as an authoritarian. The words will follow him to his obituary.
Eight years later, the two most senior members of the White House staff attempt to bully a news outlet into silence, and hardly anyone in the press says a word. It was two days before Robert Gibbs got a significant question on the subject at one of the daily briefings (from, needless to say, the fearless Jake Tapper of ABC). Gibbs in effect ignored it.
Some journalists dropped the pretense entirely, openly taking the side of the White House against their colleagues. Longtime Slate editor Jacob Weisberg wrote a piece for Newsweek in which he argued that journalists have an “ethical” obligation to join Obama’s campaign against Fox.
Meanwhile, the same White House that had just finished lecturing working journalists on the superiority of straight news coverage hosted a secret, off-the-record briefing for Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. The two, along with several other liberal commentators, spent more than two hours with Obama.
Why is the press corps giving the White House a pass for behavior it never would have tolerated from other administrations? Conservatives believe it’s simple bias. They point to the more than a dozen journalists who have quit their jobs to work for Obama, or to the network employees who wept with joy in public the night he was elected.
The answer is slightly more complicated. Most journalists don’t think the attacks on Fox have anything to do with them. They agree with Obama’s program. They voted for him. What could go wrong?
Except the Obama people aren’t at war with Fox because it’s conservative. They’re angry because Fox has embarrassed them. Its correspondents ask hard questions. Its primetime hosts got Van Jones fired from the White House by exposing him as a 9/11 denier. If Keith Olbermann had done the same thing—and don’t hold your breath—David Axelrod might be denouncing MSNBC this week. Politics is seldom as ideological as it seems.
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The campaign is about the embarrassments of August when Town Hall meetings and Van Jones dominated the news at a time when the administration thought it was going to be able to close the sale on its health care mess. They were angry that other media also followed those stories. For this White House, losing control of the message is deadly, because they have so little substance to support it.
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