Fox Attacks

President Obama has come under fire from some political commentators for attacking Fox News. I'm not talking about commentators on Fox News. I'm talking about a few commentators on MSNBC, and even Mark Shields took the White House to task on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." The argument has been the Obama cheapens himself by going after one cable news channel and singling them out as the enemy. They're not alone. When Obama tried to exclude Fox reporters from a White House event, other reporters protested and said the Fox reporters should be allowed to cover it as well. Even someone as wise and learned as Shields defended Fox for its reporting, and he said the White House should recognize the difference between Fox reporters and Fox commentators.

Let's put aside the insistence that Fox does any actual reporting, let alone fair and balanced reporting. Such an idea is too silly for me to dignify with a comment. Fox spends so much time bashing Obama, what is the President supposed to do - sit back and take it? Turning the other cheek only works for so long. Sometimes you have to fight back. President Obama is trying to change the trajectory of the nation and get it away from supply-side economics and wedge-issue politics, and the beneficiaries of these things - the right - know it. That's why Fox, an arm of the Republican party and the conservative movement, is so eager to destroy him. True, President Franklin Roosevelt had to deal with right-wing opposition, and he even had to deal with right-wing talk radio in the form of Father Charles Coughlin, but this was the days before cable television (or any television) and the Internet. FDR never had to put up with attacks 24/7. Roosevelt also never had to consider the idea of 24/7. He never even heard the phrase 24/7 (unless he heard Winston Churchill use it to mean July 24).