Example of Liberal Law #1 being used by White House

Liberal Law # 1: Dont Debate... Dictate and Dominate

EXAMPLE OF USAGE: ABUSE OF POWER

President Obama and his administration has indicated their displeasure with Fox News in various ways from the occasional dig from the podium during news conferences by the president or daily news briefings by Robert Gibbs. There have also been comments and jokes directed at Fox News during a number of speeches or interviews with other networks.

“I’ve got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration,” Obama said in June, though he did not mention Fox by name. He added, “You’d be hard pressed if you watched the entire day to find a positive story about me on that front.”

At the White House Correspondents Dinner in May, Obama even mocked the media for supporting him. "Most of you covered me; all of you voted for me," Obama said, spurring laughter and applause from the assembled journalists. "Apologies to the Fox table."

However, now the gloves are off and the White House has declared open warfare on Fox News Network by publicly declaring that they consider Fox News to be the opposition and not a legitimate news outlet. Anita Dunn, the White House communications director said, “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent. As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Additionally, not only is the president refusing any interview with or appearances on Fox News, all officials in the administration have likewise been instructed to boycott Fox News.
While animosity between a president and the media is nothing new, directing the animosity toward a specific news outlet is quite uncommon. Even Nixon's war with the New York Times was waged in private. What has never been done (to my knowledge) is the abuse of power being so openly conducted by this White House.

Most political pundits attest to the fact that conducting a feud with the press is ill-advised and rarely successful and many of them have commented as such.

David Gergen, who has worked for President Bill Clinton and three Republican presidents, questioned the propriety of the White House declaring war on a news organization.
"It's a very risky strategy. It's not one that I would advocate," Gergen said on CNN. "If you're going to get very personal against the media, you're going to find that the animosities are just going to deepen. And you're going to find that you sort of almost draw viewers and readers to the people you're attacking. You build them up in some ways, you give them stature." He added: "The press always has the last barrel of ink."

Tony Blankley, who once served as press secretary to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
"Going after a news organization, in my experience, is always a loser," Blankley said on CNN. "They have a big audience. And Fox has an audience of not just conservatives -- they've got liberals and moderates who watch too. They've got Obama supporters who are watching. So it's a temptation for a politician, but it needs to be resisted."

John Dickerson of Slate.com said, "It can look a little petty and a little small as it sort of . . . punches down at a cable network, And so they have to make sure that if they're going to take on Fox News, that they don't seem overly obsessed by it."

In recent weeks, the White House has begun using its government blog to directly attack what it called "Fox lies." I call using taxpayer money to hire someone whose only job is to watch and respond to Fox News an abuse of power. 
ONLINE COMMENTARY FROM ALL SIDES

Fox’s Volley With Obama Intensifying
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: New York Times; October 11, 2009

Attacking the news media is a time-honored White House tactic but to an unusual degree, the Obama administration has narrowed its sights to one specific organization, the Fox News Channel, calling it, in essence, part of the political opposition.

... Fox seems to relish the controversy.

“Instead of governing, the White House continues to be in campaign mode, and Fox News is the target of their attack mentality,” Michael Clemente, the channel’s senior vice president for news, said in a statement on Sunday. “Perhaps the energy would be better spent on the critical issues that voters are worried about.”

Fox’s senior vice president for programming, Bill Shine, says of the criticism from the White House, “Every time they do it, our ratings go up.” Mr. Obama’s first year is on track to be the Fox News Channel’s highest rated.
One Fox executive said that the jabs by the White House could solidify the network’s audience base and recalled that Mr. Ailes had remarked internally: “Don’t pick a fight with people who like to fight.”  ...
 
Fox on the Brain: Obama meets the real enemy.
By JOHN FUND

Brit Hume, the former White House correspondent for ABC News who has been a mainstay on Fox for the last decade, used his commentary time on Monday to address the White House attack. "Every president ends up disgusted with the news media in general and with certain individuals or outlets in particular," he pointed out," but there is an old adage often attributed to Mark Twain that advises against picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel. He was speaking of the big media of his day, which were newspapers. Most presidents, though, refrain from directly attacking media outlets, perhaps with that adage in mind."

We'll soon see if the Obama White House's decision to treat Fox News as a direct adversary works out for it -- or just makes the White House seem like another antic performer in Washington's political mud-wrestling contests.

War breaks out between Fox News and the Obama administration
• Obama fires first shot with refusal to give interview
• Critics question wisdom of network confrontation
by Chris McGreal in Washington
Published by: guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 October 2009 18.42 BST

Like many wars, it wasn't hard to see this one coming, but the formal declaration of hostilities still caught almost everyone off guard.

Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, fired the first shot of the formal conflict at the weekend when she said that Obama had refused to appear on Fox News last month - at a time when he was doing a round of interviews on other stations to promote healthcare reform - because the most-watched cable news channel in America dealt in rightwing propaganda, not news.

"Fox News often operates either as the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party," she said. "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 ... We're going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent."

... even some of those sympathetic to the White House's view of Fox question the wisdom of open confrontation with a major news network. Fox News is revelling in the publicity, using it to portray itself to a growing viewership as the only network prepared to stand up to the president.

It has some commentators repeating an old adage about newspapers, repeated by Bill Clinton when he was president: "Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel."

White House Escalates War of Words With Fox News

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." 

Fox News senior vice president Michael Clemente, who likens the channel to a newspaper with separate sections on straight news and commentary, suggested White House officials were intentionally conflating opinion show hosts like Glenn Beck with news reporters like Major Garrett. "It's astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming," Clemente said. "It seems self-serving on their part." 

... Dunn used an appearance on CNN's "Reliable Sources" over the weekend to complain about Fox News' coverage of the Obama presidential campaign a year ago. "It was a time this country was in two wars," she recalled. "We'd had a financial collapse probably more significant than any financial collapse since the Great Depression. If you were a Fox News viewer in the fall election, what you would have seen would have been that the biggest stories and biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and something called ACORN."

Ayers was co-founder of the Weather Underground, a communist terrorist group that bombed the Pentagon and other buildings in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1995, Ayers hosted Obama at his home for a political function and the two men later served together on the board of an anti-poverty group known as the Woods Fund.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which once had close ties to Obama, has been accused by a variety of law enforcement agencies of voter fraud. In recent weeks, the Democrat-controlled Congress moved to sever funding to ACORN after Fox News aired undercover videotapes of ACORN employees giving advice on how to break the law to a pair of journalists disguised as a pimp and prostitute.

As for Dunn's complaint about Fox News' coverage of the Obama campaign, a study by the Pew Research Center showed that 40 percent of Fox News stories on Obama in the last six weeks of the campaign were negative. Similarly, 40 percent of Fox News' stories on Obama's Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, were negative.

On CNN, by contrast, there was a 22-point disparity in the percentage of negative stories on Obama (39 percent) and McCain (61 percent). The disparity was even greater at MSNBC, according to Pew, where just 14 percent of Obama stories were negative, compared to a whopping 73 percent of McCain stories -- a spread of 59 points.

Although Dunn accused Fox News of being a "wing of the Republican Party," she said the network does not champion conservatism. "It's not ideological," she acknowledged. "I mean, obviously, there are many commentators who are conservative, liberal, centrist -- and everybody understands that." 

What Should Obama Do About Fox News?
by Michael Wolff
Published by: Newser - Oct 13, 2009

The Obama campaign is so ass-backward that I’m tempted to surmise that the White House must purposefully want to increase the Fox glee. When Fox froths at the mouth, that makes the Obama base froth, too. The president is matching his base against the conservative one, understanding that, even if Fox’s ratings are increasing, the conservative base itself is contracting and the liberal base expanding. Or some such thesis.

But I don’t think the president is so calculating or clear-headed on this subject. Rather, he’s fulminating. He talks about Fox the same way the Clintons talked about the right-wing conspiracy. He feels similarly pissed-off and helpless in the face of it.

During the campaign he had a secret meeting with Fox chief Roger Ailes in which he blasted Ailes for basically equating him with a terrorist. After the meeting, Ailes, I am told, had a cat-who-swallowed-a-canary look. There was a recent meeting between Ailes and David Axelrod, the president’s media guru. Ailes preened and gloated and delivered his proud defense of the network and, I am told, ate Axelrod for lunch.

They’re fuming at the White House and they don’t know what to do.

Fox News heavies Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck bite back after White House dig
BY Richard Sisk
Daily News Washington Bureau-October 13th 2009, 2:09 PM

Fox cable biggies Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly could hardly contain their delight at being labeled GOP shills Sunday by Obama administration Communications Director Anita Dunn, a charge that will likely prove a big ratings booster for the Rupert Murdoch-owned outlet. ... On CNN's "Reliable Sources" Sunday, Dunn called Fox "a wing of the Republican Party."

The White House’s War Against Fox News
By Ron Radosh
Published by Pajamas Media - October 12th, 2009 4:48 pm
 
... To any observer, it is clear that if Fox is the conservative’s station of choice, MSNBC is the darling of those on the side of liberals and the far Left. Why else do these viewers regularly watch Maddow and Keith Olbermann?  Is what they do any different from what Beck, O’Reilly and Hannity do?

... And yet, the administration has sought to only make war against Fox, and will not allow its people to be on any of their shows, even those widely acclaimed as fair-minded.

... Will a time come when the White House decision not to allow any administration spokesman to be on Fox News in 2009 backfire? Does Barack Obama, the great orator, really think if he appears for an interview with Chris Wallace- a seasoned and respected broadcaster- that he will not be able to handle Wallace’s questions, or that he will not be able to persuade any of Fox’s viewers that he, and not they, is right about the issues?

So far, in the White House battle with Fox News, it is Fox that has won. Their widely reported ban on Fox has been reported everywhere, and it makes the White House look fearful, weak, and ready only to talk with those who are more likely to agree with their agenda. Is this the change America wanted when it elected Barack Obama as President?