… clearly he has chosen a strategy in dealing with Fox News:
Senior Obama administration officials took to the airwaves Sunday to accuse Fox News of pushing a particular point of view, one week after the administration fired its initial salvo to try to isolate the news network by accusing it of being a GOP mouthpiece.
“A lot of their news programming, it’s really not news. It’s pushing a point of view,” senior adviser David Axelrod said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“The way we — the president looks at it and we look at it, is, it is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective,” White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel added on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The open assault on Fox News began last weekend when White House Communications Director Anita Dunn accused the network of being a “wing of the Republican Party.”
“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,” Dunn said 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.”
Despite calls to the White House this week, the administration did not offer a guest for this weekend’s “Fox News Sunday” to talk about Dunn’s comments, although administration officials appeared on all four Sunday morning shows to speak on various issues.
President Obama has had interviews with all of the other Sunday talk shows except “Fox News Sunday,” including a whirlwind weekend in late September where he appeared on all other Sunday talk shows.
Michael Clemente, Fox News’ senior vice president of news, said the administration’s strategy appears to be misdirected.
“Surprisingly, the White House continues to declare war on a news organization instead of focusing on the critical issues that Americans are concerned about like jobs, health care and two wars. The door remains open and we welcome a discussion about the facts behind the issues,” Clemente said in a written statement.
While the Obama Administration expends all that energy in fighting their perceived opponents on Fox News, the very real opponents being faced by our troops in Afghanistan rest in the knowledge that Obama is ignoring the war in that region:
76 days since request for more troops, Obama accused of stalling
IN Afghanistan they would call it a shura, the traditional tribal way of listening to elders’ views before reaching a consensus. In Washington, where President Barack Obama has now held five war councils, they are starting to call it dithering.
With another council on the Afghan war scheduled for this week, US officials admit it could be November before a decision is finally taken on whether to agree to General Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops. One participant revealed that the protagonists have not yet discussed troop numbers.
Latest polls show a majority of Americans now disapprove of Obama’s handling of a war which may come to define his presidency.
Failure will come to define this presidency.
Might we all survive it.
Crossposted (*).
