(April 30, 2008 - Photo by Mark Lyons/Getty Images North America)
“Fox News is Like Talk Radio…I’m not losing any sleep over it.”
President Barack Obama sat down with NBC White House Correspondent Savannah Guthrie to discuss a variety of issues, but just shortly after beginning her interview with the Chief Executive, she asked him about his new role as Chief News critic. She said to the President, ”Is this working the Umps? Do you think it is appropriate for the White House to say what is and what is not a news organization?” To which the President responded with a series of political answers, and then she pressed him to respond, reminding him that his advisors were the ones who started this debate. To that he responded, ”We are going to take (uh) media as it comes…and if media is operating basically as a talk radio format that’s one thing, but if it is acting as a news outlet that’s another.”
I understand what the President is saying here, and I may even support his position if it was consistent in any way, shape, or form. There are in fact programs on Fox News that are nothing more than talk radio programs with a camera and bigger budgets. Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity put on essentially the exact same show on the radio as they do on the air. The problem Mr. President is that they don’t claim to be news programs. They are admittedly opinion-based programs offered for “entertainment and enlightenment” to steal a phrase from Beck. The truth is, that two programs do not a network make. And similarly, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews do not necessarily reflect the journalistic integrity of their network either.
If we must explore the biases of news reporting or networks in general, perhaps we should look at PBS and their treatment of issues relating to the President. Under the administration’s rationale, can anyone make the claim that any degree of objectivity exists at PBS when one of their Chief personalities, Gwen Ifill, is the author of an Obama biography The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Her release date immediately followed the inauguration of the president. It would have been hard to sell her thesis if a victory had not been claimed.
The position that this administration continues to support and defend is flatly contradictory. If the Bush administration had taken a similar approach, all networks would have been characterized as “talk radio” – including Fox News. The President may genuinely believe that Fox has a vendetta against his administration, and it may actually be a legit claim; but is that really something that the Most Powerful Man on the planet wants to admit?
How petty and childish does the President appear to his most cherished audience- the global community – when he considers a news outlet an opponent to his administration? It is laughable. For a nation that has always championed the cause of a free press in nations around this globe, we are now of the mindset that it is prudent policy to ostracize, marginalize, and ridicule a news entity within our own borders?
Thomas Jefferson once stated, “There are rights which it is useless to surrender to the government and which governments have yet always been found to invade. These are the rights of thinking and publishing our thoughts by speaking or writing.” No President and no administration has the right and/or authority to make such determinations for the American people. This defiant posture taken by this administration is a disgrace to our Founding documents and should be seen as such by all Americans and ALL media outlets. A threat to one aspect of the press is a threat to the whole.
In speaking of the importance and the necessity of the Press, Jefferson also made the following remarks.
“One of the amendments to the Constitution… expressly declares that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,’ thereby guarding in the same sentence and under the same words, the freedom of religion, of speech, and of the press; insomuch that whatever violates either throws down the sanctuary which covers the others.”
A threat to the Institution of the Press is nothing short of a threat to the framework that has made this nation the bastion of freedom that the world has looked to for generations as a symbol of individual liberty and a promise of a responsible and accountable government.
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His objective in sitting down for this interview was to talk about women’s issues and a woman blindsided him with Fox? For Shame.
Yeah, shameful. Because that’s never happened before. “Blindsided” – please.
Did you miss the press conferences of the last 40 years?
Ha. Well put Cwize
He is lumping the two together so that when the FCC goes after one it can go after both. Hello Fairness Doctrine. thank GOd for the Internet
Where is the objectivity of MSNBC, the three major networks, CNN, etc.? They are as far to the left as they come, as that appears to sit well with the president. The only good thing that can come out of his bashing of Fox and talk radio is the exposure of this president and his administration as a bunch of petty, childish individuals who can not take an ounce of criticism. Hopefully the honeymoon period is over for this president. We need to elect a new congress in 2010 and a new president in 2012.
I certainly echo your sentiments of hoping for optimistic results in 2010 and 2012 and I do believe the Honeymoon has finally come to an end for this administration. Unfortunately, while I do see it as encouraging that journalists such as this one or Tapper from earlier in the week are seeing the threat to the Press as a whole, I am supremely confident that any support from the other networks on this issue is token at best. The more likely scenario is that they are giddy with joy as the administration is discrediting their biggest competitor. Nothing like the highest office in the land to provide support for claims that Fox is the propaganda machine of the RNC. This President is uniquely effective at distracting his opponents and I think we all probably need to come to terms with the fact that while his attacks on Fox are agregious, they are likely meant to keep our eyes away from an even bigger issue – ie. Afghanistan, Iran, N. Korea, terrorism, rising debt, cap and trade, and healthcare – just to name a few.
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