“You get into trouble if you criticize big business. The roof falls in if you criticize Congress. And we’re getting increasingly cautious in criticizing the Administration. The pressures are getting worse.”—Howard K. Smith, ABC News commentator, quoted in Edith Efron, “Television: America’s Timid Giant,” TV Guide, May 1963, collected in TV Guide: The First 25 Years, compiled and edited by Jay S. Harris in association with the editors of TV Guide (1978).
How did the Obama administration get snagged into a fight it can’t win with Fox News? Partly because it fell victim to the periodic belief of Presidents that media criticisms they face are somehow worse than their predecessors'.
The one President who didn’t compare his media treatment to a prior incumbent was George Washington, because he didn’t have any predecessor in office. But in their way, the grenades launched at him might have been the worst of all.
Here, after all, was the Father of His Country, the man who saved America from all too many hours of maximum danger, forced to deal not only with the venom of the grandson of fellow patriot Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin Bache, but also with the perfidy of his own Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, who secretly funded journals that attacked the administration.
But you can look much closer to our time to counter the self-pity of Obama and every one—Democrat and Republican—of those who preceded him in office. Jack Kennedy, for instance, is regarded not just as a kind of proto-Obama in his appeal to idealism and youth, but as a master of media relations who turned press conferences into displays of witty thrusts and parries.
But, as Smith’s quote indicates, JFK was often ready to push back when he felt he was given a bad shake. (E.g., he tried to induce The New York Times to take David Halberstam off his Vietnam beat).
Obama’s aides would have been well advised to treat Fox News like a mosquito bite: If you don’t pay it any mind, it won’t irritate you. The most they should have said about the—ahem!—“fair and balanced” cable network’s stories was, “Consider the source.”
Instead, the White House amplified the importance of Rupert Murdoch.
Did the ossified Aussie’s opposition to Obama matter in the slightest during last year’s election? Not a whit. Why should it now, in a media environment where news junkies can get stories from thousands of different Web sites?
The word for the current news environment is disintermediation—i.e., cutting out the middleman, the editor who long acted as gatekeeper for what was and wasn’t news. These days, you pick the news that fits your ideology and party label, as John Harwood spelled out, in dismaying but unsurprising detail, in today’s New York Times.
I can’t say I’m in love with all aspects of the new environment (if I have to read another Obama "birther" story, I think I’m going to scream), but what’s sometimes considered the fringe in today’s political discourse becomes tomorrow’s accepted wisdom. Even many of those unimpressed by free markets on Wall Street are far more receptive to a marketplace of ideas.
Part of the problem with the administration is that they’re being advised by people whose real job title should have been “pity party consultant.” People like Representative Alan Grayson, D-FL. You know—the guy who said the GOP’s health plan is for people not to get sick, and if they do, they should “die quickly”—the Democrats’ nice, calm answer to Republican Congressman Joe “You Lie!” Wilson of South Carolina.
“Republicans were basically playing rope-a-dope with Democrats for months,” Grayson said the other day. “Now people know what’s at stake. It’s life and death.”
On the contrary, rope-a-dope, as practiced by Muhammad Ali in his fight with George Foreman (as I explained in a post from the other day), consists of a fighter being lured into pounding himself into a state of exhaustion. The situation sounds more like the administration throwing everything it has against Fox News. They ought to conserve their strength for when it counts.
If you want to know how Democrats could turn rope-a-dope against the Republicans, you get videos of all those “tea parties” and “town hall meetings”—and I’m talking about every second of it, with every speaker in full red-faced, vein-popping, pistol-packing mode—and send it to every megaplex in the U.S. with an Imax screen so Americans can see what the opposition to health care looks like in all its rational glory.
Rather than listen to the likes of Congressman Grayson, President Obama might be better advised to check out Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s essay, “The Presidency and the Press,” which appeared 38 years ago in Commentary.
The future Senator from New York noted, with typical perspicacity: “In most essential encounters between the Presidency and the press, the advantage is with the former. The President has a near limitless capacity to 'make' news which must be reported.... The President also has considerable capacity to reward friends and punish enemies in the press corps.... Finally, a President who wishes can carry off formidable deceptions.”
As Howard K. Smith implicitly recognized even in the glory days of Camelot, the relationship between press and President is adversarial. If I were Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, I’m not sure I’d be crazy about being invited to the White House to be stroked like a pair of tabbies. I think I’d prefer seeing the President bare his fangs. That way, at least, I’d know I was doing my job.
How did the Obama administration get snagged into a fight it can’t win with Fox News? Partly because it fell victim to the periodic belief of Presidents that media criticisms they face are somehow worse than their predecessors'.
The one President who didn’t compare his media treatment to a prior incumbent was George Washington, because he didn’t have any predecessor in office. But in their way, the grenades launched at him might have been the worst of all.
Here, after all, was the Father of His Country, the man who saved America from all too many hours of maximum danger, forced to deal not only with the venom of the grandson of fellow patriot Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin Bache, but also with the perfidy of his own Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, who secretly funded journals that attacked the administration.
But you can look much closer to our time to counter the self-pity of Obama and every one—Democrat and Republican—of those who preceded him in office. Jack Kennedy, for instance, is regarded not just as a kind of proto-Obama in his appeal to idealism and youth, but as a master of media relations who turned press conferences into displays of witty thrusts and parries.
But, as Smith’s quote indicates, JFK was often ready to push back when he felt he was given a bad shake. (E.g., he tried to induce The New York Times to take David Halberstam off his Vietnam beat).
Obama’s aides would have been well advised to treat Fox News like a mosquito bite: If you don’t pay it any mind, it won’t irritate you. The most they should have said about the—ahem!—“fair and balanced” cable network’s stories was, “Consider the source.”
Instead, the White House amplified the importance of Rupert Murdoch.
Did the ossified Aussie’s opposition to Obama matter in the slightest during last year’s election? Not a whit. Why should it now, in a media environment where news junkies can get stories from thousands of different Web sites?
The word for the current news environment is disintermediation—i.e., cutting out the middleman, the editor who long acted as gatekeeper for what was and wasn’t news. These days, you pick the news that fits your ideology and party label, as John Harwood spelled out, in dismaying but unsurprising detail, in today’s New York Times.
I can’t say I’m in love with all aspects of the new environment (if I have to read another Obama "birther" story, I think I’m going to scream), but what’s sometimes considered the fringe in today’s political discourse becomes tomorrow’s accepted wisdom. Even many of those unimpressed by free markets on Wall Street are far more receptive to a marketplace of ideas.
Part of the problem with the administration is that they’re being advised by people whose real job title should have been “pity party consultant.” People like Representative Alan Grayson, D-FL. You know—the guy who said the GOP’s health plan is for people not to get sick, and if they do, they should “die quickly”—the Democrats’ nice, calm answer to Republican Congressman Joe “You Lie!” Wilson of South Carolina.
“Republicans were basically playing rope-a-dope with Democrats for months,” Grayson said the other day. “Now people know what’s at stake. It’s life and death.”
On the contrary, rope-a-dope, as practiced by Muhammad Ali in his fight with George Foreman (as I explained in a post from the other day), consists of a fighter being lured into pounding himself into a state of exhaustion. The situation sounds more like the administration throwing everything it has against Fox News. They ought to conserve their strength for when it counts.
If you want to know how Democrats could turn rope-a-dope against the Republicans, you get videos of all those “tea parties” and “town hall meetings”—and I’m talking about every second of it, with every speaker in full red-faced, vein-popping, pistol-packing mode—and send it to every megaplex in the U.S. with an Imax screen so Americans can see what the opposition to health care looks like in all its rational glory.
Rather than listen to the likes of Congressman Grayson, President Obama might be better advised to check out Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s essay, “The Presidency and the Press,” which appeared 38 years ago in Commentary.
The future Senator from New York noted, with typical perspicacity: “In most essential encounters between the Presidency and the press, the advantage is with the former. The President has a near limitless capacity to 'make' news which must be reported.... The President also has considerable capacity to reward friends and punish enemies in the press corps.... Finally, a President who wishes can carry off formidable deceptions.”
As Howard K. Smith implicitly recognized even in the glory days of Camelot, the relationship between press and President is adversarial. If I were Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, I’m not sure I’d be crazy about being invited to the White House to be stroked like a pair of tabbies. I think I’d prefer seeing the President bare his fangs. That way, at least, I’d know I was doing my job.
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