President Obama and his hoard of advisors have recently made headlines with their assertions that Fox News (or should I say Fox “News”) is not a network worthy of trust, let alone being fair and balanced. But this not entirely unprecedented attack is intriguing mainly because the country hasn’t seen this kind of antagonism directed toward a media outlet since the Nixon administration.
Examining a president’s relationship with the media has long been a study of interest for presidential scholars and political scientists. But no assessment of president-press relations is complete without a look back at the vindictive Richard Nixon. Elected on the heels of enormous public unrest (the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were still fresh in the public’s mind as was the on-going Vietnam War, after all) Nixon’s ascendance to the presidency marked one of the greatest and unexpected political success stories in history.
But Nixon’s presidency was marred by a twisted White House logic that viewed any dissenting opinions, whether they were on the editorial page or the primetime news, as attempts to undermine his message and agenda for the American people. In every instance, Nixon approached the press with a battle-like mentality in an attempt to ensure he was treated “fairly,” at all costs.
Yet it wasn’t just this suspicion and dislike of certain media outlets that characterized the Nixon White House as much as it was the systemized effort to strike back. Nixon, along with aides H.R. Haldeman and John Erlichman and others within the upper echelons of the administration organized efforts to retaliate against news outlets, including public denunciations, lawsuits against CBS, NBC and ABC, wiretapping reporters’ phones, an enemies list and other covert activities.
Fast forward to 2009 and what you have is a new administration, but the same Nixon tactics. Yet this time, the animosity is being directed only at the unfair and unbalanced network that is Fox “News.”
“The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party,” espoused White House Communications Director Anita Dunn recently on CNN. “When he [the president] goes on Fox he understands he is not going on it as a news network at this point. He is going on it to debate the opposition. [Fox is] widely viewed as a part of the Republican Party […] let’s not pretend they’re a news organization like CNN is.”
Senior Advisor David Axelrod also went on the offensive, explaining that Fox is “not really a news station.” “It’s not a news organization so much as it has a perspective,” added Rahm Emmanuel. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs even joined in by specifically targeting Fox’s Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, saying they represented the networks’ unfair coverage. And according to U.S. News and World Report, a “senior Obama adviser” said, “Our hope is simply that responsible journalists will not go chasing after Fox stories as if these stories were legitimate.”
If this doesn’t reek of an organized, Nixonian push to discredit a privately-owned news network simply for presenting different views, what does? There is no evidence yet that proves Axelrod and Emmanuel are another Haldeman and Erlichman team; but though the Obama administration’s tactics aren’t as extensive, the same mindset that plagued the White House in the early 1970s is afflicting the White House again.
The only difference today is that the rest of the mainstream media isn’t rising up in outrage against the Obama administration. The White House pool, to their credit, did stand up against the administration when it tried to exclude Fox from interviewing Kenneth Feinberg, but that’s been the extent of their action on behalf of their fellow network. During Nixon’s day everyone from Time Magazine to the Washington Post to the New York Times was writing negative editorials about the president because of his attacks against the media.
But just like what happened with Nixon, President Obama will soon find out that any strategy that involves attacking media networks isn’t going to produce positive results. Obama is going directly against his promise for bipartisanship and reaching across the aisle. Instead, it seems as though his new era of politics is one intent on shutting down the opposition. That’s not what the American people voted for.
A recent Gallup poll showed Obama’s approval ratings at 53 percent. This is especially telling considering the decline in his popularity since July is the steepest of any president at the same stage of the first term in over 50 years. An organized, systematic attack on a news network won’t help those numbers. If Nixon were still alive, he would attest to that fact.
******
Amanda Carey is the Editor of The Tiger Town Observer at Clemson University. She has previously worked for Robert Novak and has been published in Reason Magazine and The American Spectator.
Loading ...