Scott Ott's Examiner Scrappleface: Hillary talks with Fox News, offers bilateral fact cuts
By: Scott Ott
Examiner Columnist
October 20, 2009
News fairly unbalanced. We report. You decipher.
As tensions mount in the cold war between the White House and Fox News, Obama administration sources say the president could soon dispatch Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for direct, high-level talks with Fox News President Roger Ailes.
The furor erupted when Fox unilaterally "fact-checked" an Obama administration source, a practice unheard of in television news.
Clinton hopes to "reset" the dialogue between Ailes and Obama by proposing "joint fact cuts without the normal monitoring and compliance protocols," she said this morning.
"This is a goodwill gesture from President Obama," Clinton said. "He's willing to let bygones be bygones, if Fox will drop its obsession with documenting our truth claims."
Meanwhile, global oil prices spiked higher, and the United Nations called a special session of the Security Council as the crisis quickly spun out of control Monday. White House staffers put the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on the back burner to deal with the clear and present danger posed by a new enemy.
Obama senior adviser David Axelrod declared that Fox News is "not a news organization." White House Communications Director Anita Dunn called it "opinion journalism masquerading as news." And the official White House press corps spokesman said, "Fox News gives a black eye to the whole industry every time it challenges information from unimpeachable, trustworthy sources, like the Obama White House."
Clinton hopes to strike a much more conciliatory tone, in a fashion reminiscent of the administration's approach to dealing with Iran and North Korea.
"We need to be willing to talk with our enemies," Clinton said. "While we can't surrender the high ground when it comes to this fact-checking business, there may be other areas where we can find common ground."
Examiner Columnist Scott Ott is editor in chief of ScrappleFace.com, the world's leading family-friendly news satire source.
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