Obama Administration Attempting to Eliminate Freedom of the Press

The Obama Administration's attack on FoxNews is merely the 2nd salvo in it's attempt to subvert the freedom of American press outlets. The first was their absolute control over contact with the press during the 2008 presidential campaign.

The Obama campaign's press strategy leading up to his election last November focused on "making" the media cover what the campaign wanted and on exercising absolute "control" over coverage, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn told an overseas crowd early this year.

In a video of the event, Dunn is seen describing in detail the media strategy used by then-Sen. Barack Obama's highly disciplined presidential campaign. The video is footage from a Jan. 12 forum hosted by the Global Foundation for Democracy and Development in the Dominican Republic.

"Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn't absolutely control," Dunn said, admitting that the strategy "did not always make us popular in the press."

The video drew attention after Dunn kicked off a war of words with Fox News last Sunday, calling the network "opinion journalism masquerading as news." The White House stopped providing guests to "Fox News Sunday" in August after host Chris Wallace fact-checked controversial assertions made by Tammy Duckworth, assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/10/19/white-house-official-says-obama-team-controlled-media-coverage-campaign/

Additionally, last week, Ms. Dunn announced the Obama Administrations attack on FoxNews by stating:

"The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party. And it is not ideological... what I think is fair to say about Fox, and the way we view it, is that it is more of a wing of the Republican Party. ..."

This is the same strategy that Hugo Chavez used in Venezuela to eliminate media opposition. There remains only 1 radio station and 1 television station there who are in public opposition to his regime. It's estimated that by next summer, neither will remain.

Here in the US, the FCC's announced plan to begin taxing media outlets that air "one point of view" with fee that will equal their operating costs will effectively close down most independent radio stations. http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=31575

What we now also know is that the Obama Administration is circulating a proposal for a new "spectrum use" tax and another proposal for "diversity" of station ownership -- mandating racial and gender quotas as to who should be "allowed" to own radio stations.

What's at stake here ? Simply put--Free Speech on the Radio.

While the wider aim is to assert tighter government control over all radio programming, the immediate target here is conservative talk radio. The "progressive" tilt at publicly funded NPR, or the Big Business ownership of liberal leaning network news does not bother Obama. He knows that the executives at GE and NBC Universal will self censor to avoid criticism. In a recent meeting, GE CEO Jeff Immelt and NBC Universal President Jeff Zucker met to discuss how to limit criticism of Obama on MSNBC.

Thus, the Obama Administration while targeting FoxNews now, is actually assaulting the 1st Amendment freedoms of all Media outlets.

Donald Sensing, on his blogs believes (as do I) that, the Obama Administration is using the communist writer/theorist Saul Alinksy's playbook, who in his work, Rules for Radicals, wrote that one of the rules of "power tactics" is to,

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. In conflict tactics there are certain rules that [should be regarded] as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and 'frozen.'...

"...any target can always say, 'Why do you center on me when there are others to blame as well?' When your 'freeze the target,' you disregard these [rational but distracting] arguments.... Then, as you zero in and freeze your target and carry out your attack, all the 'others' come out of the woodwork very soon. They become visible by their support of the target...'

"One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other." (pps.127-134)
Let's consider the first sentence, which has become probably the most-quoted of the whole work, seriatim.

Pick the target. Do not make the mistake of thinking that FoxNews Channel is the actual target. The bullseye target of this campaign is all the public media. FNC's role in this much broader attack is the next two precepts.

Freeze it. This does not mean to shock the target into inactivity, but to fix a certain perception about the target in the minds of the broader community, in this case the media figures in general and the minds of the community (in this case, the whole nation is the community) as a whole.

The White House strategy here is twofold. First, to freeze FNC away from being thought of as just one of the universe of media outlets. White House Communications Director Anita Dunn opened this volley by declaring that FNC is not really a news organization, but the propaganda arm of the Republican party.

http://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2009/10/attack-on-fox-news-right-out-of-alinsky.html

I hope and pray that the rest of the MSM wakes up in time to see that they have been played by the Obama Administration. Because if they don't we may well see the end of our Republic in my lifetime.