I'm just trying to understand the administration's calculation in using this attack tactic to deal with right-wing media. Clearly right wing media are never going away. Clearly, while they get a big media share of the news pie, they still only reach a relatively small number of people. And the number of people who identify with Republicans and with its obstructionist program promoted through its media megaphone is down around 20%. So why should the administration care? Why not just let these people talk to themselves, and let them continue along this path which leads to marginalization and irrelevancy to every one with an ounce of sanity and common sense?
The answer: it's a containment strategy. The administration is concerned to hear that after the ACORN incident, mainstream news organizations are chastising themselves for not taking more seriously the news that these right-wing media invent, and the last thing the administration wants is for right-wing nonsense to be taken seriously outside the right-wing media ghetto. That's what they want to nip in the bud before we get full throttle into the kind of thing Clinton had to deal with. The problem lies in how right wing nonsense was covered by the networks and other mainstream media to legitimate what was fundamentally illegitimate. It's understandable that Obama's people would be looking for ways to prevent that from happening.
If the administration can make the case that FOX deserves to be marginalized, not because it criticizes the administration from a conservative point of view, but because it is not really independent insofar as it serves as the talking-points media arm of the Republican party, then they have a legitimate case to be made that FOX is different and deserves to be shut out until it changes its behavior. The equivalency with MSNBC or with the opinion journalism of Maddow and Olbermann is unfounded. They represent a Liberal/progressive point of view, but their opinions are not Dem talking points, they are often critical of Democrats, and they simply bear no resemblance in their relationship to the Democrats that FOX news personalities bear toward the Republicans. And most important, while they make no effort to hide their biases, they don't make stuff up. There is no equivalency here, and it's fair for the administration to point that out.
The problem is not that nobody at FOX has no serious journalists–there are apparently a few who qualify–nor does the problem lie in that sometimes they criticize the administration from a conservative point of view.It isn't just opinion; it's abetting and colluding with Republican political strategists. The problem lies in how a problem how these strategists make things up, throw mud on the wall to see what sticks, spread disinformation and confusion, and seek to subvert any legitimate debate with fearmongering and jingoism. They fabricate and distort in the hopes of manufacturing controversy that the MSM will cover, no matter how baseless, because people are talking about it. Think Vince Foster, Whitewater, death panels, Obama is a racist, fascist communist, etc., etc.
The challenge for the administration is not to marginalize legitimate criticism but to quaranteen that kind of baseless fabrication. How do you do the one without the other? It might not be possible, but I don't begrudge them for trying.
P.S. See also this bit on Mickey Kaus's take. The point isn't that it's unbiased, but that it's not independent.
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