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White House Attack on FoxNews:
Part of Obama’s “Need” to Have an Enemy to Vilify?

by

There is something both petty and pathetic in watching the White House going on the warpath against FoxNews, with White House communications director Anita Dunn calling the network “a wing of the Republican Party“.  And this isn’t the first time she’s whined about FoxNews.  Even the President has joined in the attacks.

Guess they’re upset they’re not getting the same fawning treatment from Fox they got from the rest of the news media.*  And it does seem a strange use of the  White House Communications Director’s time to lead an attack on a news network.  I mean, I thought her job was to communicate the President’s message, not malign independent messengers.

But, then, maybe this White House does seem to need an enemy to vilify.  You know how Obama did so well by running against Bush.  (Hey, it does seem to have worked, he won election and even won a Nobel Peace Prize for not being that much maligned Texas Republican.)

I mean, by any normal stretch on the imagination, the White House’s assault is counterproductive and without merit.  The treatment Obama gets from FoxNews is no worse, if not slightly better (indeed, I would say, in some cases, significantly better) than his predecessor got from the other networks.  And then there’s that veneration he receives from the rest of the news media.

(Not just that, of the three major news network, FoxNews provided the most balanced coverage of last fall’s Presidential election and had the politically most diverse audience.)

Seems the President is quite “thin-skinned” and really just doesn’t like criticism.  Even leftists have taken notice.  Michael Barone points out that John Nichols of the left-wing Nation called the President the “Whiner-in-Chief.”  A newspaper bloggers who voted against Nixon in 1972. thinks “President Obama is positively Nixonian in its repeated, juvenile and dangerous in its personal attacks on critics.”

I wonder if the incumbent is wrestling with inner demons similar to those with whom Nixon wrestled.  Both seem to have a need to attack adversaries.  Maybe it’s not psychological, but just part of a campaign governing political strategy.

RELATED: Right, Left… Obama fires in all directions

*Given the fawning treatment the President has received from the news media, Jennifer Rubin finds the Administration’s whining “comical”:

No candidate and no administration has gotten such glowing treatment from the media. You would think they’d look at the big picture and be content that much of their work — ignoring uncomfortable story lines, vilifying the opposition, editing out the “uhs” and “ums” from speeches, and casting news in the most Obama-favorable light possible — is done for them. But no, they find the one TV cable network that sees its role as entirely independent of the Obama agenda to be such an irritant and so offensive that they must grouse about the speck of tough coverage in an ocean of fluff.

Comments

  2. Maybe my memory is just selective, but I don’t remember President Bush using the authority and constitutionally derived power of his office to attack CNN during his time in office. Oh, I’m sure he said a comment or two that could be considered that way, but never as an active and concentrated policy. For some reason having the President act this way comes off as rather tyranical- isn’t this the type of stuff they do in poor improvished brutal dictatorships?

  3. There’s a saying in Hollywood that has become a tried-and-true rule for politicians: “Don’t believe your own press.” Unfortunately, the President seems to have been seduced by his. Having entirely disregarded the 47% of the country who didn’t vote for him, along comes Ms. Pelosi with the memorable, “We won,” when asked about Obama’s increasing and diverse opposition.

    This sort of arrogance can only have been nurtured by succumbing to the notion that the love and adoration heaped upon Obama by the MSM was somehow on par with the emotional state of the American people following the death of FDR and the assassination of JFK. Our mourning and disagreements aside, all of us felt a degree of love for these two Commanders-in-Chief that transcended how we may have disagreed with their worldview.

    So now comes Barack, the Word made Manifest, who seems confounded that there exists among the congregation any element that sees him as the same flawed human being we know ourselves to be. Personally, I must confess that I at one point truly respected the man; not as a politician, but as a fellow human. I respected his weaknesses with regard to smoking, and rather enjoyed his reluctance to surrender his Blackberry. These things made him human, and someone with whom I could identify.

    However, this vendetta against FNC has destroyed that, and convinced me that perhaps the hyper-partisan allusions to another era in world history when dissenting opinions were similarly marginalized in the name of the greater good may not be so far-fetched after all.

  4. I’m thrilled with the Obama Administration’s attacks on the media, particularly those against Foxnews and Rush Limbaugh. It will make it all the more difficult for them to claim that they are not trying to silence conservative viewpoints when the FCC moves forward with its “Localism” agenda (the Fairness Doctrine, Version 2.0).

  6. Fox is the only station keeping the USA from being Cuba. If not for Fox, none of the lies, whitwash and fake polls would be reported. We’d only have Pravda lite reporting any nonsense Obama wants them too and there would be no one reporting otherwise. Fox is the fly in the total media takeover ointment.

    FOX is the ONLY network totally screwing up his awesomeness messiah presidency! The WH isn’t upset with critisism, it’s upset that FOX is the ONLY station keeping people from being totally duped on all his idiot and marxist decisions.

  8. What really makes them angry is that Glenn Beck is funnier than Bill Maher, John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Garrison Keillor, Janene Garafolo, David Cross, David Letterman, Wanda Sykes, Tina Fey, et. al.–the people we’re SUPPOSED to think are funny because they’re so much smarter and superior. But Glenn Beck is actually funny–the red phone to the White House is great. I bet Stephen Colbert wishes he’d thought of it.

  9. Conservative Teacher,

    “For some reason having the President act this way comes off as rather tyranical- isn’t this the type of stuff they do in poor improvished brutal dictatorships?”The president is working on that, and is on schedule getting us there.

  10. As the outsider, my comment is that the present WH Administration is proving worse than Nixon.

    I was a teenager when Nixon became President, in fact I was about to head to University for my degree in Economics and Commerce when Nixon became President. The Australian press was not Nixon friendly and so we got all of the stories.

    Whilst I do not remember a lot of the detail, I do remember headings such as “Mad Bomber Nixon”. I believe that kind of epithet came from the left…. no biggie… it is just that the Left forgot to mention that it was a Democrat President that got all of us into Vietnam… LBJ and JFK got us there…. At the same time I remember the Watergate affair, and I remember the relentless hammering given to Nixon over the Watergate tapes. I feel sorry for the Nixon White House Aides who ended up in prison because looking at this present bunch of crackpots, they did nothing wrong in comparison.

    Nixon did get a bit paranoid because of the relentless of the DNC and the Left. He did a lot of things that were wrong on the domestic scene…. yet he achieved things on the International scene which have been overlooked by most pundits.

    The present incumbent has achieved absolutely nothing. The Administration has proven itself to be foolish in the extreme. It gave up things in a unilateral fashion to the Russians. That was totally foolhardy.

    The press should be reporting these things as not being in the best interests of the USA but they are in the tank with Obama so they fail to report accurately those things.

    Ditto for the reporting on the Honduras. Reuters and AP are continuing the lie that there was a coup in the Honduras, and I think that is disgusting. The only reporters telling the truth are on Fox News. As for CNN the reporters have totally abrogated their responsibility as far as accuracy is concerned.