Quote of the Day

David Harsanyi:

"...if this administration can't handle one cable station's opposition, what does that tell the American people about its mettle on issues that matter?"

Read more...

First, They Came for Fox News

From the Rosett Report:

You don’t have to love Fox News to see how dangerous it is when the President of the United States gives his staff and advisers a green light to single out and denigrate by name a specific news organization. As we surely all know by now, this is what the White House has been doing to Fox.

The Sunday morning talk shows just brought us White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod opining to George Stephanopoulos, on ABC’s “This Week,” that Fox is “Really – not news — it’s pushing a point of view.” Axelrod advised that ABC and other non-Fox outlets take his cue and expunge Fox from the brethren of news services: “And the bigger thing is that other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way, and we’re not going to treat them that way.” Meanwhile, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was hammering home the same message, that Fox “is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective,” and urging “More importantly is not have [sic] the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led in following Fox, as if what they’re trying to do is a legitimate news organization… .”

This would be a very good moment for all those other news organizations — CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, the newspapers and the news web sites – to offer President Obama the perspective that it is utterly inappropriate for White House personnel to be opining publicly on the overall fitness of specific news outlets. The president has sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That includes protecting free speech, not dispatching White House staff and advisers to hold forth publicly as media critics denouncing news outlets they don’t like.

If errors of fact turn up in reporting, the White House is entitled to dispute them. But Axelrod and Emanuel were not disputing a particular piece of reporting. They were slamming wholesale a widely followed and highly informative news outlet, and denouncing it as not “legitimate.” (Full disclosure here: I have done consulting work for Fox, which has consisted of reporting and writing news stories under my byline for them from time to time since 2004. Further disclosure: In my own experience of putting in a lot of sweat to cover stories for Fox, this is an organization that cares plenty about news, about accuracy, and about substantiation in reporting. Here’s a link to a joint by-line piece I wrote with Fox News Executive Editor George Russell in 2005, which helped lead to the arrest of a former United Nations procurement officer, Alexander Yakovlev, and his guilty plea to federal charges of wire fraud and money laundering. Here’s a piece I wrote just last month for Fox, on how Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad personally recruited a now-convicted sanctions buster while visiting UN headquarters in New York. This wasn’t based on “perspective,” but on federal court documents).

The matter of deciding whether a news outlet has “a perspective” — and many do — is something that in a free country, if the country is to remain free, should be left to the private customer. There are legions of critics in the private sector who spend their time analyzing and debating which outlets provide the most reliable news, what’s entertainment, who’s opinionated, and how, and who’s not. They are easy to find. You can tune in, subscribe, and decide for yourself. These folks, like the media they criticize, are subject to the market test — in which private consumers freely make their own choices about what or whom they trust, what they pay for, what they pay attention to, and why.

Government personnel getting into this act is altogether different. These are people paid out of the public purse, and speaking under the imprimatur of public institutions — in this case the White House. Here they are, urging White House-favored news outfits to follow the White House lead, and ostracize a specific news outlet the White House doesn’t like. This is Banana Republic stuff, a stock tactic of pressure and intimidation. The effect of such stuff, as a rule, is not to promote accurate news coverage, but to cover up stories the government doesn’t want aired, and shut up critics.

Other news outlets — the CNNs, ABCs, NBCs, CBS’s, or for that matter the New York Times and the Globe-Post-Mercury-Etceteras, may not agree with opinions expressed on Fox. But they would be wise to remember that what goes around comes around. And if they don’t rally now around the idea that the White House has no business vetting, according to its own “perspective,” which news outlets are “legitimate” and which are not, then the legitimacy of all news outlets becomes a function of “point of view” held by the White House. Welcome to the road to China’s Xinhua News Agency and Russia’s Channel One TV.

Read more...

Time to Focus

News story in black, my comments in red.

Calling Fox News "a wing of the Republican Party," the Obama administration on Sunday escalated its war of words against the channel, even as observers questioned the wisdom of a White House war on a news organization.

"What I think is fair to say about Fox -- and certainly it's the way we view it -- is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party," said Anita Dunn, White House communications director, on CNN. "They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that's fine. But let's not pretend they're a news network the way CNN is."

This, of course, would be laughable, if it weren't so serious. Our nation faces serious problems. Unprecedented levels of debt, threats from multiple enemies and a recession that won't go away, no matter how much we tell it to. Now, the administration wants to spend their time demonizing the news.

In an interesting and ironic twist, they complain about Fox New's coverage of ACORN and Bill Ayers during the last election cycle, as if Fox was unable to cover those stories as well as other important stories. I say it is ironic, because while the administration wants to spend its time demonizing a media outlet, it seems to be unable to make a decision on Afghanistan, unable to know what to do about Iran and unable to come to terms with the economy.

While Obama was jetting off in a failed attempt to get the Olympics to come to Chicago, defenders we outspoken about his ability to multitask. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case. Obama may look like he can walk and chew gum at the same time, the problem is he only reads about walking and chewing gum from a teleprompter.

It's time for the administration to quit screwing around and get its eye on the ball.

Read more...

The Boycott Against Glenn Beck Will Backfire

Glenn Beck, the conservative commentator and star of one of the most successful shows on Fox News, is under attack. And as Rush Limbaugh has repeatedly proved, under attack is the best place for a conservative commentator to be. It allows the blusterer to play victim – and it gives a savvy spin doctor a chance to rile up his base.

First, let’s get you up to speed. Last month, Glenn Beck told the hosts of Fox & Friends that President Barack Obama has a “deep-seated hatred for white people.” That statement apparently wasn’t explicit enough, so Beck made sure everyone understood his point: “This guy is, I believe, a racist,” he said.

Plenty of folks on the left have accused Beck of treason for his comments. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume his internal filtering mechanism was temporarily disabled. What is the appropriate response to that kind of rhetoric? For his part, Bill Shine, Fox’s senior vice president of programming, told TVNewser that Beck had expressed a “personal opinion which represented his own views, not those of the Fox News Channel.”

But that wasn’t enough for some of Beck’s advertisers, who began this week to pull spots from “The Glenn Beck Program.” Among the companies that removed advertising were Progressive, Geico, Radio Shack and Roche. Meanwhile, a political group called ColorOfChange.org is circulating a petition, asking consumers to boycott Beck’s show.

“Beck is on a campaign to convince the American public that President Obama’s agenda is about serving the needs of Black communities at White people’s expense. It’s repulsive, divisive and shouldn’t be on the air. Join us in calling on Beck’s advertisers to stop sponsoring his show,” the petition reads.

What Beck's detractors forget is that controversy increases ratings.

And, ultimately, that's why these attacks against Beck will backfire. Few people knew who Don Imus was until he made his "nappy haired ho's" comment. Relatively few, anyway. Now, everybody knows who Don Imus is. Even though Imus lost his job, he's more popular than ever. Howard Stern (who I consider to be a complete degenerate) has built an industry shocking people. The more outrageous he became, the bigger his program.

To be sure, most Fox News hosts aren't really that controversial. Yes, the left considers O'Reilly, Hannity and others to be radical extremists. But they've built their audience, not on controversy, but more on presenting news stories and commentary from a viewpoint more consistent with the majority of Americans.

Beck takes a different approach. Rush Limbaugh occasionally says that he illustrates the absurd by being absurd (or something to that effect). This is what Beck does. He's a little off-beat and quirky. His views are perhaps a little off-kilter, even for the majority of the Fox audience. But he is entertaining, cute, and makes a lot of sense. Add to those attributes "controversial" and you have a can't lose combination.

Read more...

We are the cutting edge...

One of the blogs I follow (I forget which one.  Sorry, because you may read this) began a few weeks ago calling Obama "The Tele-Prompter" and "The Teleprompter of the United States (TOTUS)." I found that appellation made a point in a humorous way, and I have started doing the same thing on occasion, particularly when referring to Obama at a time he actually uses a tele-prompter.

The front page of the Fox News website (foxnews.com) has copied us.  They have a headline calling Obama the "Prompter-in-Chief", leading an article on his need for a teleprompter for a news conference.

Folks, we are the cutting edge in news.  Even Fox News is copying us.

Read more...

When, If Ever, Did Obama Tell Us the Truth?

If Obama claims a mandate, shouldn't it be related to what he campaigned on?

You would certainly think so.  In an article on the FoxNews Fox Forum, John R. Lott, Jr. tries to find one instance in which Obama actually told us the truth about the economy and what he was going to do about it during the presidential campaign.  

For example....

What exactly did he learn immediately after the election about the economy that caused him to go from a budget cutter to proposing the biggest increase in spending ever? Prior to the election, Obama was already regularly claiming that the economy was in the worst financial crisis since the depression. Do you cut spending when you are in the worst financial crisis since the depression, but massively increase it if you can claim that things have gotten a little worse?

The whole article is worth a read.  You can find it here.

Read more...

Say It Isn't So!

I thought Obama was invincible ... that he couldn't make a mistake.  But here we are, two weeks into the Obamanation, and lo and behold.....

(from Fox News)....

President Obama admitted he made a "mistake" in his handling of Tom Daschle's Cabinet nomination, telling FOX News on Tuesday that he takes full responsibility for a process that ended in Daschle withdrawing his name amid tax problems. 

The president also said in the interview with FOX News that he's standing firm on a Feb. 16 deadline for the multi-billion dollar stimulus bill being debated on Capitol Hill, despite growing concerns that package contains too much unnecessary spending. 

Daschle's withdrawal, along with wrangling over the stimulus, made for possibly the rockiest day of Obama's presidency so far. The president said he will learn from the Daschle debacle. 

"I consider this a mistake on my part, one that I intend to fix and correct and make sure that we're not screwing up again," Obama said. "Ultimately I have to take responsibility for a process that resulted in us not having a (health and human services) secretary at a time when people need relief on their health care costs. 

"So this is a mistake -- probably not the first one I'm going to be making in this office, but what I'm absolutely committed to doing is fixing it," he said. 

Obama, who had tapped Daschle to steer a sweeping health care reform effort, said the next order of business is to find another "highly qualified" health and human services secretary. 

Obama denied influencing Daschle's decision to withdraw, which caught a number of senators by surprise Tuesday. Though Daschle caught flak for revelations that he had failed to pay more than $130,000 in taxes, the former Senate majority leader has strong personal ties on Capitol Hill, and several Democrats said they thought he still could have won confirmation. 

Read more...