"Obama Versus The Free Press"

In 1969 and during the first half of 1970, I was a wet-behind-the-ears, 29-year-old staff aide in the West Wing of the Nixon White House. I was working for the wisest man in that White House, Bryce Harlow, who was a friend of President Johnson, as well as the favorite staff member of President Eisenhower, and President Nixon’s first appointee.

Based upon that experience and my forty years since then in and out of public life, I want to make what I hope will be taken as a friendly suggestion to President Obama and his White House: don’t create an enemies list.

In 1971 Chuck Colson, who was then a member of President Nixon’s staff and today is admired for his decades of selfless work in prison reform, presented a list of what he called “persons known to be active in their opposition to our administration.” He said he thought the administration should “maximize our incumbency . . . [or] to put it more bluntly, . . . use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” On that list of 20 people were people like CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, Washington Star columnist Mary McGrory, Leonard Woodcock, the head of the United Auto Workers, John Conyers, the Democratic Congressman from Michigan, Edwin Guthman, managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, and several prominent businessmen such as Howard Stein, of the Dreyfus Corporation and Arnold Picker, vice president of United Artists. The New York Times and the Washington Post were made out to be enemies of the Republic.

What was different about Colson’s effort, though, was the open declaration of war upon anyone who seemed to disagree with administration policies. Colson later expanded his list to include hundreds of people, including Joe Namath, John Lennon, Carol Channing, Gregory Peck, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Congressional Black Caucus, Alabama Governor George Wallace. All this came out during the Watergate hearings. You could see an administration spiraling downwards. And, of course, we all know where that led.

Now the only reason I mention this is because I have an uneasy feeling, only ten months into this new administration, that we’re beginning to see symptoms of this same kind of animus developing in the Obama administration.

Having once been there, I can understand how those in the White House feel oppressed by those with whom they disagree, how they feel besieged by some of the media. I hope the current White House occupants will understand that this is nothing new in American politics—all the way back to the days when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson exchanged insults. The only thing new is that there are today multiple media outlets reporting and encouraging the insults 24 hours a day.

As any veteran of the Nixon White House can attest, we’ve been down this road before and it won’t end well. An “enemies list” only denigrates the presidency and the republic itself. (Read Full Article)

In the media world, the main reaction to the barrage of Fox criticism by the Obama White House has been less outrage, and more puzzlement as to what Obama’s aides hope to gain by taking on the network so forcefully.

A day after White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said other journalists should no longer treat Fox as a bona fide news outlet, the comments generated only a single, tangential question at the White House’s daily briefing for reporters.

Still, the comments set off alarm bells with some journalists and media analysts.

“I can never remember a White House urging news organizations to boycott other news organizations. That strikes me as unprecedented,” said Thomas DeFrank, a Washington journalist who has covered eight presidents and now serves as the bureau chief of the New York Daily News.

“I see it as bullying a news organization, by the time you get to telling ABC or some other news organization how they should behave to another news organization,” said David Zurawik, media critic for the Baltimore Sun. “Someone should tell them: you’re one branch of government. We’re something else over here. Don’t lecture us about how we should behave towards one another.”

The salvos from Axelrod and Emanuel built on remarks a week earlier in which White House Communications Director Anita Dunn accused Fox News of operating as “a wing of the Republican Party.”

“They’re not really a news station,” Axelrod told ABC’s “This Week.” “It’s not just their commentators, but a lot of their news programming if you watch, it’s really not news….The bigger thing is that other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way, and we’re not going to treat them that way. We’re going to appear on their shows. We’re going to participate, but understanding that they represent a point of view.”

“It’s not a news organization so much as it has a perspective,” Emanuel said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “More importantly, is to not have the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led in following Fox, as if what they’re trying to do is a legitimate news organization.”

The direct attacks, if leveled at another news outlet or by another White House might have aroused a torrent of criticism, but the flow of outrage from the Washington journalistic set has been more like a trickle.

“In the past, whether it was a Democratic or Republican president who stood up and attacked quote-unquote news organizations, the natural instinct of the Fourth Estate was to rally around and support that entity regardless,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist and communications aide in the Clinton White House. “The rest of the press corps winds up being the umpire on that.”  (Read Full Article)

"No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will." (Thomas Jefferson)

    Fox News, the self proclaimed "fair and balanced" news channel, has a conservative bias, as I and many others see it. Fox News is hard on the liberal Obama White House to the same degree that liberal biased MSNBC and CNN support the Obama White House. No TV station, radio station or newspaper is unbiased and totally objective in it's news reporting. Citizens must take in all news with a grain of salt and discernment, separating facts from opinions, propaganda and political "spin".

   Apparently the Obama White House, like the Nixon White House, disagrees with Thomas Jefferson when he said "no government should be without censors". Totalitarian governments and dictators prohibit dissent and a free press. The Obama White House blackballing Fox News is disturbing to me and no doubt many other Americans. Having a free press is in America's Bill Of Rights. It is my hope that President Obama will retract the statements made by those in his inner circle and let Fox News be Fox News with all it's criticism of the Obama White House, something called the Free Press. The US Constitution is greater than any political agenda of any political party, as I see it.

tags: politics  takebackamerica  free press  lamar alexander  obama  

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