The White House is calling on other news organizations to isolate and alienate Fox News as it sends out top advisers to rail against the cable channel as a Republican Party mouthpiece.
Top political strategists question the decision by the Obama administration to escalate its offensive against Fox News. And as of Monday, the four other major television networks had not given any indication that they intend to sever their ties with Fox News.
But several top White House officials have taken aim at Fox News since communications director Anita Dunn branded Fox "opinion journalism masquerading as news" in an interview last Sunday.
White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN on Sunday that President Obama does not want "the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox."
Obama senior adviser David Axelrod went further by calling on media outlets to join the administration in declaring that Fox is "not a news organization."
"Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way," Axelrod counseled ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "We're not going to treat them that way."
Asked Monday about another Axelrod claim that Fox News is just trying to make money, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that while all media companies fall under that description, "I would say sometimes programming can be tilted toward accentuating those profits."
But by urging other news outlets to side with the administration, Obama officials dramatically upped the ante in the war of words that began earlier this month with Dunn's comments.
via White House Urges Other Networks to Disregard Fox News - Political News - FOXNews.com.
Monday, October 19, 2009
White House Urges Other Networks to Disregard Fox News
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4 comments:
Whether you support the WH in this or not, the highly probable result will be that it will galvanize many in support of FOX and elevate them not from just new source status, but cult status.
Personally I believe this is very Nixon-esque... and how did that do for him? Someone said (and I paraphrase) "never get into a war of words with an organization that buys ink by the barrel". FOX (as are most modern-day news sources) is more popular than any newspaper. I see this ending badly for the White House.
It's about time. Every clip I see of them, and their values, I find myself gagging. I feel sorry for the ones that have to call this station news.
It's about time the White House decide what station is newsworthy? Sounds a little totalitarian to me. And what station would you call news?
Give cash rewards to any one who is able to show that information presented by any news organization is incorrect. Give progressively stiffer fines to any news organization that purposefully bends the truth for sensationalism or profit. This should hold for all news sources, not just for FOX.
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