Fox News lashed back at the White House for calling the cable channel “a wing of the Republican Party,” releasing a statement calling the remarks “self-serving.”
“It’s astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming. It seems self-serving on their part,” said Michael Clemente, a senior vice president at Fox News.
It was an interesting choice of phrase: Earlier today, a White House spokeswoman called a report released by the insurance industry “self-serving.” The report claims health care reform would increase premiums.
On Sunday, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn went after Fox News, saying, “Let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is,” and describing Fox as President Obama’s “opposition.”
In a straight-news segment on Fox today, the channel compared Obama to President Nixon for his attitude toward Fox.
“This order to freeze out a leading news organization is similar to those President Nixon infamously directed at the New York Times,” said correspondent James Rosen. In 1971, Nixon tried to stop the Times from printing the Pentagon Papers, a bleak report on the Vietnam War. The Supreme Court struck down his attempts as prior restraint, a violation of the First Amendment.
Fox also reported that an aide to Dunn denied the requests of several shows to interview the President, saying it won’t happen this year.
This is the latest in escalating tensions between the administration and Fox. On Sept. 30, a staffer wrote on the official White House blog about Fox’s “disregard for the truth.”
Before that, Obama snubbed Fox News Sunday when he toured five other Sunday shows to push for health care reform. Before that, Fox snubbed Obama by refusing to air his address to the joint session of Congress on their main network (although they did play it on Fox News and Fox Business.)
Last month, Fox’s White House reporter Major Garrett went after the administration, suggesting it broke the law when collecting email lists.
Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, reportedly had an informal meeting a few weeks ago with David Axelrod, one of Obama’s senior advisers.
Today’s Fox segment claimed the channel has the “greatest balance” of Republican, Democratic and Independent viewers among the major cable channels, and boasted its ratings, which are much higher than CNN’s or MSNBC’s.
In his statement, Clemente took a hit at Obama’s skills at governing.
“Instead of governing, the White House continues to be in campaign mode, and FOX News is the target of their attack mentality,” Clemente said in his statement. “Perhaps the energy would be better spent on the critical issues that voters are worried about.”
