The White House Turns Nixonian, An Analysis

An outstanding analysis of the White House/FoxNews battle that is ongoing. This week, when the Obama Adminstration attempted to block FoxNews from participating in a pool interview of the unaccountably appointed (i.e. no Senate confirmation hearinng) executive pay Czar, Kenneth R. Feinberg. CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS in a clear sign those networks weren't comfortable in the White House stance, Fox's competition refused to go along with the attempt to exclude Fox the interviews that was to be conducted with a camera crew shared by all the networks. The below analysis is from the comments on Michael Silence's blog from KnoxNews.com:


If the other networks' reasons had been purely principled, they probably would've said something last week, when the "war" started. Since they didn't, I'm sure we can discount that as a reason.

Which leaves us with two points which differentiated this week from last week...

First, the WH stepped up the campaign last Sunday when Emanuel and Axelrod made their pitches against Fox on the Sunday shows. They went further than Anita Dunn had in her criticism, adding that the other networks shouldn't "follow Fox's lead." (My take on that was that they were suggesting not only that they shouldn't be critical of the WH like Fox was, but also that they shouldn't report on any stories of scandal Fox might break.)

Keep in mind, the WH was PO'd with Fox for things like reporting on Van Jones, the NEA being used as a propaganda tool, and the ACORN tapes -- all stories either unearthed by Fox or heavily covered by them, and they were the only major outlet to do so. When Van Jones resigned, suddenly the rest of the media had to report a story they'd been ignoring for a couple of weeks. When the same thing happened with ACORN, they ddecided maybe they needed to start paying attention to the stories Fox was reporting. And now, suddenly the WH is telling them to go back to sleep... So they're faced with either being completely irrelevant to their customer base because they go back to ignoring breaking news stories, or they have to follow Fox's lead, which will PO the WH.

Given that one choice seals their financial doom, it's not hard to see why they'd go in the other direction..

The other reason I think they waited until this week for the push-back was that Glenn Back started playing a new tape of Anita Dunn, which was made during an interview, post-election, in which she talked at length about how the campaign had controlled the media during Obama's bid for the WH.

There's nothing more stinging to a lackey press than to have the story of how the campaign played you like a fine Stradavarius splashed on a competing network...

So when the WH insisted that Fox be excluded... well, they suddenly overstepped. The press had no choice but to push back and defend one of their own, even if they kind of agree with the WH about Fox.

BTW... I do think they also started to realize with the Chamber of Commerce war the WH started this week, that ANYONE who crosses Obama once will be targetted. The only way to safeguard yourself from attack is to present a united front, since attacking on multiple fronts isn't a winning strategy. (That's not to say the WH won't try it, but given how much Obama loves to see himself on TV, I kinda doubt he'd give up appearing for countless interviews with news and late night talk show hosts..) So the WH had no choice but to relent. After all, when Anderson Cooper starts referring to your administration as "Nixonian," you know you're in trouble...

Posted by: elaine at October 23, 2009 10:45 AM