Politicians are sounding a little paranoid about the media these days.
The White House is trying to blockade the largest cable news network. A House candidate called the police when a reporter asked her about abortion. Congressional leaders turn to angry media critics as they talk about why support for health care legislation remains tepid.
Lashing out at the press has always been a popular play for politicians in distress, and it’s often a precursor to eventual failure. (See Hart, Gary, and Agnew, Spiro).
But the antagonism of left-leaning politicians toward the conservative media goes beyond blaming the messenger. The vilification of media naysayers represents an effort to de-legitimize dissent.
Any liberal who thinks otherwise should imagine what would have happened if the Bush administration had tried to isolate NBC for the ranting of its cable news personalities. How would journalists have responded if Karl Rove had said NBC was “not really news,” as David Axelrod said of Fox?
Would Jake Tapper of ABC News be the only White House correspondent from a major network with the brass to question whether it was appropriate for the president’s team to try to destroy the credibility of his most vocal critic?
That the effort to cut off and destroy Fox by the president has not prompted thunderous outrage from all journalistic quarters is evidence of two things: media bias and the initial effectiveness of the White House move.
Desperate for copy and worried about access, most reporters seem content to allow the president and his flack corps to decide what will count as real news and what will not. With layoff notices and bankruptcy filings piled up like bleached bones on the sides of a treacherous trail, media outlets are content to leave Obama’s spiteful conduct unanswered.
The attacks on Fox helped break the cycle that has been buffeting the White House for months. A story pops up in the blogosphere, is ignored or overlooked by mainstream outlets, then gets picked up by Fox News, which repeats it until the rest of the media world has to pay attention.
If there were no Fox News, most Americans would have never heard of the president’s pestilent former pastor, his radical “green jobs czar” or the antics of the Obama backers at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Bloggers and independent journalists can churn up the stories, but without the Fox megaphone, they would never have gotten traction.
With the complicity of the supposed defenders of a free press at The Washington Post and the New York Times, the White House is succeeding in putting Fox in what the network’s former anchor, Brit Hume, described as a “quarantine.”
But on a strategic level, the tactics are sure to backfire.
By provoking a showdown with Fox, the administration hopes to rally liberals to the Obama flag. The Left has grown disenchanted with the Obama brand as it becomes clear that the president’s brand of change is corporate-approved.
The White House wants to make liberals choose sides. Just as it did with Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh in the past, the Obama press shop likes to play up conservative bogeymen in hopes of scaring liberals back into the fold.
The implicit warning is that Obama is the only thing standing between them and a world ruled by Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. The White House strategy is to attack Fox and stroke Keith Olbermann and watch the liberals scamper back to their rightful place.
It’s the kind of us-versus-them ploy that Obama once said he deplored and for which the American people have shown appropriate contempt.
Obama’s success came from telling Americans that we could reason together to solve big problems. That, evidently, wasn’t just a campaign overstatement but a misrepresentation of his governing philosophy.
But America is not Chicago and bullying tactics will not make viewers turn off Fox. More likely they will be drawn to its forbidden fruits. And the independent voters who swung to Obama’s side last fall are not impressed with the White House decision to perpetuate and escalate the partisan war that is poisoning the nation’s politics.
What independent voters see is a presidency bereft of passion on major policy but full of fire for the war with conservatives. This suggests that as the White House is winning back liberal skeptics, it is pushing moderates even further away.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
