Was the White House planning to use McCain-Feingold to silence Fox News?

The White House war on Fox News heated up in early October. It culminated, after almost 3 weeks of harassment, in an unsuccessful effort to exclude Fox, a member of the White House press pool, from an interview with pay czar Kenneth Feinberg. In a successful pushback, members of the press pool unanimously refused to conduct any interview, unless Fox was included. The White House backed down.

The language used to marginalize Fox was primarily “Fox is not a legitimate news organization” used by Gibbs on many occasions, and then Communications Director Anita Dunn’s “[T]he way we view it is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party” followed by “But let's not pretend they're a news network….” It was Dunn’s comments on CNN’s Reliable Sources that started the drumbeat that ostensibly ended in late October. But it hasn’t. Last Monday (Jan. 18), just two days prior to the to the Citizens United decision that wisely gutted the censorship provisions of McCain-Feingold, current Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer (and Anita Dunn’s husband) picked up the drumbeat again. We don't feel an obligation to treat [Fox News] like we would treat a CNN or an ABC or an NBC or a traditional news organization. But there are times when it would make sense to communicate with them and appear on the network.

 The cause for worry is the precise language used by the White House to demean Fox. It has been: “not a legitimate/traditional news organization/network,” and “a wing of the Republican Party.” McCain-Feingold bans electioneering communications by corporations and unions that mention federal candidates by name 30 days prior to primaries and 60 days prior to the general election. It carves out an exemption for the “institutional press” but disallows the exemption when a broadcast station is “owned or controlled by any political party, political committee, or candidate.”

Does Dunn’s contention that Fox is “a wing of the Republican Party” constitute “control” under McCain-Feingold? Would Gibbs’ “not a legitimate news organization” disqualify Fox News from the “institutional press” exemption? Would the FEC go along with these assertions and apply a gag order on Fox deep into the election cycle, making a stay impossible before Election Day? Fortunately the Supreme Court resolved the problem, so we will never know.

But the explosive response by Senator Schumer D-NY to the decision may give a clue to Democrat intentions. We must recognize the Obama administration has an “enemies list.” And unlike the Nixon administration, it makes no secret of who is on it. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are in their crosshairs.

The First Amendment has protected free and vibrant political speech for over 200 years, and will continue to do so if we are vigilant.

The FCC should use its power to cut the legs out from under liberal news

In the days before deregulation, hordes of economists at the CAB and the ICC set tariffs and determined the “correct” amount of service on city pairs for the airline and trucking industry respectively. One of the few gifts Jimmy Carter gave us was to replace these clunky and inefficient regulatory agencies with a far more rational and efficient system that is market driven. Unfortunately we are about to lurch back into the past, though not necessarily in those industries.

The one agency that is jumping at the opportunity to reregulate the market is the FCC. With all its newfound zeal, it now has a perfect opportunity to redress a true market imbalance. There are five TV/Cable news operations: ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News and CNN. 4 of the 5 are certifiably liberal and only one conservative. Yet the latest Gallup Poll shows there are twice as many conservatives as liberals (40% to 20%). Surely the FCC should use its club of license renewal to persuade say NBC and CBS to join the conservative club. Still, that would give only a 3 to 2 conservative preponderance, rather than a deserved 2 to 1, but we could live with that.

Obama’s thuggish tactic to intimidate the media … finally hits a snag

One shouldn’t underestimate the significance of yesterday's pushback by the members of the White House news pool over the exclusion of Fox News from the interview process with pay czar Kenneth Feinberg. The unanimous decision of members of the pool (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN) to refuse any interviews without Fox’s presence had the White House quickly and dramatically reversing course. The announcement of the backdown came late in Bret Baier’s evening news segment on FNC. It was announced without acrimony, and without comment. There was no gloating. But all present with Baier realized its import. That the pliable media, so long in the bag for Obama, saw a bigger issue: the freedom of the press. And they stood firm.

The crisis reached its peak starting two weeks ago after a month of warfare against Fox News. Anita Dunn declared Fox News was “a wing of the Republican Party,” and was “opinion journalism masquerading as journalism.” Finally this past Sunday and Monday, senior White House officials in an unprecedented effort to emasculate a media organization, told the media they should ignore Fox.

From a Fox News report:

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN on Sunday [October 18] that President Obama does not want "the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox." Obama senior adviser David Axelrod went further by calling on media outlets to join the administration in declaring that Fox is "not a news organization. Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way," Axelrod counseled ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "We're not going to treat them that way."

  On Tuesday at a White House press conference, press secretary Gibbs continued the theme started by Emmanuel and Axelrod. But he was challenged by Jake Tapper of ABC News, one of the few willing to directly confront the administration.

It’s escaped none of our notice that the White House has decided in the last few weeks to declare one of our sister organizations “not a news organization” and to tell the rest of us not to treat them like a news organization. Can you explain why it’s appropriate for the White House to decide that a news organization is not one …?

Gibbs of course refused to concede Tapper’s point. But then the warfare escalated even further as Obama himself joined the fray in an interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie. From Fox News:

On Wednesday, Obama, speaking publicly for the first time about his administration's portrayal of Fox News as illegitimate, said he's not "losing sleep" over the controversy. "I think that what our advisers simply said is, is that we are going to take media as it comes," Obama said when asked about his advisers targeting the network openly. "And if media is operating, basically, as a talk radio format, then that's one thing. And if it's operating as a news outlet, then that's another. But it's not something I'm losing a lot of sleep over."

All of this was not only to marginalize Fox, but to set the stage to ensure the press pool would do the White House’s dirty work to exclude Fox. It didn’t work out that way.

But there is more at play than just Fox. The ACORN story was the first challenge to the media’s blackout strategy that “got legs.” I have written here, here and here about what appears to be a coordinated effort by the major media to deny coverage of stories antithetical to liberal/Democrat interests. Thanks to two young and courageous individuals, Andy Breitbart and Fox News, the media was stung in their attempt to hide the story. And that was in particular Breitbart’s aim.

But an interesting thing is happening. AP did cover the latest O’Keefe/Giles tapes of the Philadelphia ACORN office, as did many metro dailies. AP in particular is now covering stories that were untouchable in the past, as is the Washington Post. Surely the White House is noticing it. And with their thuggish tactics, they are trying intimidate the media back into line.

Fox News Special … Awesome Megyn Kelly takedown of Wade Rathke and Acorn

Out of habit I left the family room TV on after last night’s O’Reilly (hosted by Juan Williams) and moved to my den to catch up on happenings from the internet. I could hear but not see the next show which should have been Hannity. But it wasn’t. It was a Megyn Kelly interviewing Wade Rathke, founder and former and chief organizer of ACORN.

My initial impression was this was a very fair and objective interview by Kelly. She took him through his formative years of the radical 60s to the present. As the show went on Kelly, with the help of Stanley Kurtz and others, proceeded to eviscerate Rathke to the point he boiled over. It was devastating to ACORN because it exposed and documented visually their extortion techniques and the hard left political leanings of its founder. But the revelations were only half the story. The special was powerful because it relied heavily, very heavily, on the subtle audio and visual effects pioneered by CBS’s “60 Minutes.” So much so I thought I was listening to Leslie Stahl, not Megyn Kelly, on the voice-over of the historical video clips. Her voice-over had exactly the same cadence and remoteness, while the interview itself carried normal voice animation. The documenting clips started even handedly, but became more pointed as the special went on.

Someone at Fox did his/her homework analyzing the techniques that have made “60 Minutes” so powerful and authoritative. It isn’t just the subtle movement from even-handedness to pointed probing. It’s making the subject react. But the audio is the killer. Watch and listen to the whole show here. Congratulations Fox!

Fox News stomps its liberal competitors.

Fox News is on a tear. Its ratings have surged and its competitors have declined, not just in share, but in total numbers. When Fox News began in 1996 it was given little chance for success. But by 2001 it began surpassing CNN the only other all news cable channel at the time. The hunger for better balance, so lacking at CNN, vaulted FNC into the lead. It now has prime time demo ratings larger than its two competitors combined. From Media Life Magazine: When Barack Obama arrived at the White House six months ago, there was a lot of speculation that conservative media outlets would see ratings shoot up as unhappy Republicans turned to shows whose hosts were critical of the new administration's agenda. For the cable news networks, that appears to be the case. Fox News, the No. 1 cable news network and the most right-leaning of the bunch, is surging. At the same time, CNN is sinking, with its ratings sometimes slipping below those for liberal-leaning MSNBC. And further… For the quarter in 25-54s in primetime, Fox News was up 50 percent from the year-earlier period, to an average 518,000 viewers. MSNBC ranked No. 2 for the first time ever for a full quarter, but it was down 1 percent to 268,000 viewers. CNN’s audience plummeted 19 percent, to 240,000 viewers in the demographic.