White House vs. Fox News

Eventually, it seems, every president since George Washington has become impatient with the media, with loyal aides, especially, acting as if any questioning of the sublime wisdom and prudent actions of the chief executive is tantamount to treason, or at least evidence of ill-concealed partisanship and bad taste. However, the vendetta the Obama administration is conducting against Fox News Channel, while it may not be unprecedented, is more than a little curious in its virulence and persistence.

It is difficult to believe that it is good politics.

It's not that the White House is entirely inaccurate in characterizing most of those at the news channel as unsympathetic to the administration. Certainly its personality-driven feature shows are almost uniformly conservative in character (Geraldo Rivera being an occasional exception) and are sometimes over-the-top in seeing nothing but peril and disaster coming from Obama initiatives. Fox claims it is like a newspaper, with both straight news and clearly labeled opinion segments, like an editorial or op-ed page. While some Fox reporters and anchors do deliver the news fairly straight, however, some appear on the opinion segments and offer opinions, uniformly conservative in nature.

But calling Fox News "a wing of the Republican Party," as White House communications director Anita Dunn did recently, saying the White House views the channel as an "opponent" rather than a real news outlet, or urging other news outlets to shun the cable channel, is almost as over-the-top as a Glenn Beck segment.

It is more likely to increase Fox viewership than to discourage it.

With the rise of 24-hour cable news we may have reverted to a previous era in our history, when newspapers were openly partisan both in their news and opinion coverage — papers named the Springfield Republican or Appeal-Democrat were just that and didn't claim to be "fair and balanced." Certainly cable channel MSNBC, while it delivers news fairly straight in some segments, does not go out of its way to give conservatives opinionated feature shows (though it does put the ineffable Pat Buchanan on the air fairly often). In the 20th century most newspapers and, later, TV newscasters have striven to present news fairly objectively and label opinion sections clearly. But few reporters are devoid of opinions, and those opinions can not only affect the choice of stories to feature or dig into, but occasionally leak into ostensibly "straight" news coverage.

If some outlets have arisen that don't bother to hide their biases, the White House would do better to accept the reality and adapt to it than to pick jejune catfights with certain media. Openly attacking one cable channel makes it appear that the administration is in constant campaign mode. That doesn't increase confidence in its ability to impartially govern the entire country.

REPRINTED FROM THE NEW BERN SUN JOURNAL.

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