Thursday, Oct. 23 was an interesting day.
After the Obama administration made their “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg available for interviews by all members of the White House press pool except Fox News, the other four Washington bureau chiefs consulted and told the administration their reporters would not meet with Feinberg unless Fox News was granted equal access.
This development highlights the toxicity of the White House assault on the network news giant.
Though Obama and his advisers may be justified in their criticism of the network, they must remember that they are not media analysts but high-ranking officials in the government.
Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, white house chief of staff and senior adviser to the president, respectively, have warned the likes of CNN to avoid following in FOX’s footsteps in becoming what the administration views as a “research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party,” “pushing a point of view,” “not a news organization so much as it has perspective,” and a “talk-radio format.”
All of this may very well be true. Many voices in the conservative media are using access to mass viewership as a means of saber-rattling. Just last week, I covered Rush Limbaugh’s buffoonery, and those who follow this column may remember that it did not have the nicest words for Bill O’Reilly last year.
But the Obama administration’s confrontational attitude with the media giant that is Fox News is a foolish undertaking. At a time when the administration needs every single potentially friendly voice screaming its causes ““ health care, anyone? ““ the administration cannot afford to alienate the millions of Fox viewers in this country.
The directive to take Fox to task ““ wherever it came from ““ is therefore ultimately too bent on highbrow notions of journalistic fidelity and lacking in pragmatic consideration.
Various voices within the administration have gone public with their own, personal convictions regarding Fox. Deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer aptly summed up the sentiment on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Pfeiffer pointed to coverage of what the White House thinks are fringe elements of the health-care debate as especially irresponsible: “When you are having a debate about whether or not you want to kill people’s grandmother, the normal rules of engagement don’t apply.”
Pfeiffer is right. The administration has every right to correct the record. That job falls on the shoulders of Barack Obama and Robert Gibbs. The president’s litany of televised prime-time speeches and Gibbs’s daily press conferences provide ample opportunity to call all media outlets out on what they deem to be irresponsible in the reporting of the administration’s message.
But correcting the record is not the same as singling out the most successful news operation in the country. Boycotting a Sunday talk circuit once is a fine way of sending a message, but the president is mistaken if he believes sending an army of advisers out to trash Fox is going to help him win over Americans.
Consider the cable news ratings for September. Fox News Channel is home to the first, second and third most-viewed cable news programs.
But it doesn’t stop there. They also have the next 10.
CNN’s best shot? Larry King Live sitting comfortable at the 14th most-watched cable news program.
Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes’ outfit scored more total viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined ““ in daytime and prime-time.
The O’Reilly Factor has been No. 1 for 106 consecutive months. That means that for the past eight years and some change, Bill O’Reilly has hosted a program that has bested all competition every single month. Bill-O now enjoys about 3,295,000 viewers.
But perhaps the most telling statistic of all lies in Fox’s success not just as a news network, but as a cable network.
The Obama administration must be right when it says that Fox blends entertainment with news, because the network is currently ranked third in prime-time viewers ““ out of all the basic-cable networks.
If there were a time for caps lock or exclamation marks in a column, this would be it.
This last factoid means that a news channel outscores networks such as ABC, CBS, TNT, etc., etc.
The only networks that beat Fox were ESPN and the USA Network.
Clearly, people are listening to Fox News.
Although it is certainly true that not everyone who watches the network agrees with its purported message, it is a hyperbole to make the sometimes-aired argument that a lot of Fox viewers are hateful liberals who watch the show to infuriate themselves.
A Sept. 26 New York Times column by Clark Hoyt chastised that same paper for falling days behind Fox on the ACORN scandal.
Rumors persist that since the column, an editor at the Times has been assigned the dubious honor of watching Fox.
So regardless of Fox anchor Shep Smith’s painful broadcasting style that is perhaps best characterized as Armageddonism, or Sean Hannity’s asinine brand of partisan politics, or Glenn Beck’s teary-eyed zealotry ““ we’re crying too, Glenn ““ the White House should really play nice.
After all, angering Rupert Murdoch can never be a good decision.
E-mail Makarechi at kmakarechi@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.