“Choose your battles wisely.” Good advice for individuals, and good advice for a President that is escalating his personal war with Fox News. This is not a battle that has any good outcomes for the current administration. The reasoning is ridiculously petty, their pleas to other news outlets seem desperate, and this move only serves to illuminate the lack of experience and maturity of Barack Obama and the people with whom he surrounds himself.
Not only has the Obama administration refused to provide any guests for Fox News programs, but now they have called out to other news media outlets asking, “join the administration in declaring that Fox is ‘not a news organization.”" That desperate plea demonstrates how the Obama administration hates any and all criticism and questions about their policies. This is supposed to be the President of the United States, yet shows no backbone, or ability to deal professionally with opposition. Fox News continues to enjoy ratings that outperform all other media outlets, with a few of their programs individually beating the combined ratings of several other channels. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck each command ratings that outnumber those of CNN and MSNBC combined! With those statistics Fox certainly is a real news organization. Barack Obama on the other hand doesn’t seem much like a real President.
What has Fox done now to make the Obama administration so outraged? Their outlandish crime was to fact check an administration guest on Fox News Sunday. Chris Wallace fact checked disputed assertions made by Tammy Duckworth, assistant secretary of Veterans Affairs, during her appearance on the show back in August. Wow, can you imagine a news agency actually doing it’s job and fact checking the claims of administration officials? Oh the horror! If Fox is allowed to continue on this path, the public may get the impression we have some kind of freedom of the press in this country. White House Communications Director, Anita Dunn, said that fact-checking an administration official was “something I’ve never seen a Sunday show do.”
Of course we know how much loathing Anita Dunn has for the free press. Speaking at a January 12th, 2009 event that focused on Obama’s media tactics, Anita Dunn said, “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 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. We just put that out there and made them write what Plouffe had said as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it as opposed to the press controlled it.”
How annoying talking to all of those reporters must be for them. After all, there are crazy things like questions to answer, and all that pesky fact-checking. It should be no suprise that communications from this White House take on this aroma of press control and propoganda. During a commecement speach at a high school graduation in June, Anita Dunn went on record as saying how much she admires Mao Tse Tung, the biggest murderer in human history. The communist dictator Mao is responsible for killing 70 million of his own people in peace time, as well as taking away rights and freedoms for millions of Cinese. Making Adolf Hitler’s atrocities seem small by comparison, Mao is one of Anita Dunn’s “favorite political philosophers” and somebody she “turns to most.”
What should trouble Americans isn’t Fox News, but rather how many people in the Obama administration often tout their respect and support for communists, marxists, and socialists! It’s not as if Fox News makes this stuff up, these people are recorded on video stating these things for themselves. In addition, the administration doesn’t do much to distance themselves from those ideals when they openly target any news organization that actually fact-checks them. Remember, they didn’t dispute any of Fox’s facts, they are just angry that they were fact-checked at all. I guess they want to make any claim regardless of whether or not it has any basis in reality, then have the American people swallow it without question. That sounds like communist thought control and propoganda to me.
On top of not doing anything to distance themselves from communist ideals, the Obama administration just looks petty and weak by declaring war on Fox. Instead of focusing any energy at all on a real war in which thousands of our soldiers are fighting in Afghanistan, the administration would rather send out all of their attack dogs to competing media outlets to escalate a war on Fox News, while vacillating over sending troops based on an August request from our top military commander in Afghanistan.
The Obama administration has also failed to live up to it’s own promise of transparency. Today top White House officials sit behind closed doors with only democrat senators to work on merging several healthcare versions into one bill. During the campaign Obama went on record as saying, “I’m going to have all the negotiations around a big table televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.” So much for open negotiations. Also, why are there no Republicans at the table? Wasn’t this the president who was going to bring everyone together? I guess not. Instead this administration seems more concerned with silencing anyone who even asks questions about what they are doing and saying, just as Mao Tse Tung shot political opponents in the back of the head.
Americans know when they are being sold a line of bull, and they know who they can trust. That is why Fox News continues to command the ratings they do, and will continue to only grow in popularity. They seem to be the only “real news organization” left. They hold people accountable, they ask tough questions, and they continue to do so, regardless of the baseless attacks from the White House. In short, they are exactly what a news organization should be. What really is scary is that the White House doesn’t seem to get any hard questions, or fact-checks from any other media outlet. That should deeply trouble Americans who love liberty and freedom, almost as much as having an administration that seeks to silence free press and who worships communists.
