Jack Shafer has just published a fascinating behind-the-scenes article, “Barack and Anita Diss Roger Ailes.” Shafer, in writing about press coverage Obama deemed insufficiently favorable, writes this:

Obama’s hatred of the conservative press fully manifested itself when he became president and immediately assigned his communications director Anita Dunn to hammer the media in a series of remarks. But there is no denying his special animus for Fox, which he regards as overtly conservative in its news coverage.

“He was convinced that Fox had it in for him,” Rahm Emanuel told Howard Kurtz for his new book, The War on Fox: The Obama White House v. a News Network. Emanuel professed not to know where Obama’s hatred came from but said whenever Fox broadcast an unfavorable story on him, he’d send e-mails prohibiting his people from talking to the network.

Obama and his people loved to make the political as personal as possible. A week after the Emanuel-Kurtz conversation, senior adviser David Axelrod warned Fox White House correspondent Major Garrett over the phone that Ailes would find his “ass in a sling” if Fox continued its negative coverage of Obama.

The account I just cited is mostly accurate, except that the original version — written by Jack Shafer for Slate in 2007 — was about Richard Nixon and his administration’s hatred for the Washington Post rather than about Barack Obama and his administration’s hatred for Fox News. The names of the key actors (and key parts of the human anatomy) have been changed — but the burning anger for and the bullying tactics aimed at a particular news organization have not.

The Obama administration has set out on an ugly and dangerous path, one we have been down before. It’s time for the Obama White House to take these words to heart:

I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. … As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, “We are not enemies, but friends … though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”

So said Barack Obama on the night he was elected. They were wise words then; they are wise words now.

del.icio.us

Google

Facebook

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 11:02 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.