White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on CNN's Sunday morning show said that the Fox News Channel is not a news organization. It's a perspective he said. And Emanuel said that, more importantly, CNN and the other television networks should not treat Fox News as an equal or words to that effect.
In another example of this administration's abuse of power, Obama's senior political advisor, David Axelrod, said much the same thing on ABC News on which he told the anchor -- a former political hack and attack dog in the Clinton Administration -- George Stephanopoulus, that (paraphrasing now) ABC and the other networks should not treat Fox News as a news organization.
The White House does not allow any of their cabinet officers or senior White House personnel to go on Fox News anymore (there was one exception when Axelrod showed up after smoking a tentative peace pipe with the President of Fox News, Roger Ailes.) Fox News is a network which has over half of its audience liberals or independents; which scares the Obama administration. It has more viewers than all the other cable news show combined and then some.
Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod were following up the White House offensive the week before led by White House Director of Communications Anita Dunn who declared war against Fox News. She said that the reality of it is, Fox News operates as the research arm of the Republican Party.
This is the same Anita Dunn whose favorite philosopher (besides Mother Theresa; now that's a strange duo) is the worst mass murderer in world history, Mao Tse-tung, who killed from a low of 34 million Chinese citizens, up to 70 million Chinese. Mass murderer Adolph Hitler is said to have murdered 21 million in comparison.
It is obvious that Emanuel and Axelrod and Dunn and the rest of the thugs in the White House were trying to intimidate the other television news networks into not reporting anything that Fox News was reporting on such as the communist Van Johnson scandal; such as the ACORN scandal, such as the Anita Dunn/Mao scandal. The question is will the other "mainstream" television networks continue to be intimidated by the administration's vicious threats. The first two scandals became so big that the other networks were forced to follow Fox News.
Anita Dunn bragged about Obama's control over the news media especially during last year's presidential campaign: "Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn't absolutely control. One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe (Obama's campaign manager) videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters."
Obama and his henchmen in the White House have been used to wall-to-wall adulation and obsequious coverage during the past 2 years including the presidential campaign and during the first 9 months of Obama's presidency. They got virtually no tough questions from NBC, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, et al, during the presidential campaign and the first months of the Obama presidency.
The last time a president and his political flacks hated the news media so much was during Richard Nixon's presidency and his venom was directed at the left-wing "New York Times" and the "Washington Post" during his Watergate scandal. The venom of the current White House is directed only at Fox News and conservative radio talk show hosts who they intend to silence with their "Fairness Doctrine" diktats.
One of the most extreme left-wingers in Congress, Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat from Illinois, said about this controversy: "Fox has become the official/semi-official voice for the Republican Party, in opposition to the president. And I think calling them out is the only way to delegitimize them as political propaganda." Of course, Durbin and the president and their henchmen do not admit that CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN have been the semi-official voice for the Democrat Party and the left-wing for decades.
Fox News senior vice president Michael Clemente replied to the tsunami of criticism emanating from the White House against his network: "An increasing number of viewers are relying on Fox News for both news and opinion. And the average news consumer can certainly distinguish between the A-section of the newspaper and the editorial page, which is what our programming represents. So, with all due respect to anyone who might still be confused about the difference between news reporting and vibrant opinion, my suggestion would be to talk about the stories and the facts, rather than attack the messenger ... which over time, has never worked."
It is way past time for this administration to stop its Stalinist tactics against its opponents and attempts to stifle the First Amendment rights of its opposition. As Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican from Tennessee was quoted in "The Hill" newspaper on October 15: "The president's getting awfully personally involved in this, it seems to me. For a sitting president of the United States to take on a network that millions of Americans watch every day -- that's a risky step."
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