Calling 'Em Out: The White House Takes on the Press

[question everything]

Thursday, Oct. 08, 2009
Calling 'Em Out: The White House Takes on the Press
By Michael Scherer
TIME

There was never a single moment when White House staff decided the major media outlets were falling down on the job. There were instead several such moments. For press secretary Robert Gibbs, the realization came in early September, when the New York Times ran a front-page story about the bubbling parental outrage over President Obama's plan to address schoolchildren — even though the benign contents of the speech were not yet public. "You had to be like, 'Wait a minute,'" says Gibbs. "This thing has become a three-ring circus."

For deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer, the more hyperbolic attacks on health-care reform this summer, which were often covered as a "controversy," flipped an internal switch. "When you are having a debate about whether or not you want to kill people's grandmother," he explains, "the normal rules of engagement don't apply." And for his boss, Anita Dunn, the aha moment came when the Washington Post ran a second op-ed from a Republican politician decrying the "32" alleged czars appointed by the Obama Administration. Nine of those so-called czars, it turned out, were subject to Senate confirmation, making them decidedly unlike the Russian monarchs. "The idea — that the Washington Post didn't even question it," Dunn says, still marveling at the decision.

(snip)

The take-no-prisoners turn has come as a surprise to some in the press, considering the largely favorable coverage that candidate Obama received last fall and given the President's vows to lower the rhetorical temperature in Washington and not pay attention to cable hyperbole. Instead, the White House blog now issues regular denunciations of the Administration's critics, including a recent post that announced "Fox lies" and suggested that the cable network was unpatriotic for criticizing Obama's 2016 Olympics effort. White House officials offer no apologies. "The best analogy is probably baseball," says Gibbs. "The only way to get somebody to stop crowding the plate is to throw a fastball at them. They move."

The general in this war is Dunn, 51, a veteran campaign strategist who arrived at the White House in May. She has been a force in Democratic campaigns since the late 1980s and helmed Obama's rapid-response operation during his run. At the White House, she has become a devoted consumer of conservative-media reports and a fierce critic of Fox News, leading the Administration's effort to block officials, including Obama, from appearing on the network. "It's opinion journalism masquerading as news," Dunn says. "They are boosting their audience. But that doesn't mean we are going to sit back." Fox News's head of news, Michael Clemente, counters that the White House criticism unfairly conflates the network's reporters and its pundits, like Glenn Beck, whom he likens to "the op-ed page of a newspaper."

(snip)

It is not hard to awaken her fiercer instincts. "Here in the White House, you are reluctant to feel like you have to go to that place," she says. "But we have to be more aggressive rather than just sit back and defend ourselves, because they will say anything. They will take any small thing and distort it." In other words, after eight months at the White House, the days of nonpartisan harmony are long gone — it's Us against Them. And the Obama Administration is playing to win.



http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1929058,00.html

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Hard to believe that they were all so naive as to believe in

a "liberal (or even neutral) media.

And hoodafuk unrecced this thread already?

[question everything]

4. That's because the so-called "liberal" media was determined to bend

backwards to "prove" they are not liberal.

This is what always bugs me: you have newspaper that are (were) considered liberal like the LA Times, or the Minneapolis Star Tribune - who are working so hard to prove they are "balanced" that they include columnists from the right and the left.

But newspapers that are known to be conservatives could not care less.

[Jackpine Radical]

7. I think you give them too much credit.

I see them as the propaganda wing of the Corporate State. The right-wing demagogues keep feeding the masses disinformation that includes the notion that the press is "liberal." This creates an atmosphere in which their lies and distortions can thrive more robustly. Newspapers don't really matter anymore. They have an aging and diminishing readership; the real game is on the tube, and there are few liberal voices--and the ones that exist are constrained in their range of topics. A Bill Moyers can be tolerated, even an Olberman. They don't matter. Check sometime to see how large their viewerships really are.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. All I can say is.."What the hell took them so long?"

It is about time they stood up and fought back...

[spooky3]

3. Seems to me that they have only two choices because of media complacency and/or bias

"Them" attacks "Us", with no response, and gradually even independents come to believe the insane lies, OR
"Us" responds to "Them" attacks, by calling Their lies and BS exactly what they are.

There is no possibility of "nonpartisan harmony" when the attack machine is operating 24/7. Until the media is ready to do its job, I'll take option B.

[quiet.american]

5. This is EXCELLENT. -- And the site is fab. nt

[C_U_L8R]

6. Journalists have had ample opportunity to police their profession

and quite evidently they have flopped at that simple responsibility.

So now it's up to the rest of us to throw the fakers, the liars, and the manipulators out of the business.

Thanks journalists (extreme sarcasm)

[ErinBerin84]

19. this is true

most media critics are just defenders of the beltway.

[Hekate]

8. This is a thing of beauty. KnR, with deep pleasure. nt

[Kablooie]

9. There's an article in Atlantic this month about how the press has stopped doing it's job.

They rely on untested material fed to them not by reporters but by partisan hacks who will create any kind of propaganda to destroy the opposition.

The days of disinterested reporting that attempts to get to the truth are over.

[question everything]

15. For one thing, all the news outlets let go of many reporters

This is the irony. Last year, or perhaps earlier, the Chicago Tribune told the LA Times - that it owns - that there was no need for that many reporters since... much is available on the Internet. And the LAT people responded: how, do they think, do stories get on the net? When one search Yahoo news or Google News - many stories are (were) from the LAT or the NYT or the WaP.

It is not the "just the facts." It is also looking into the topic and asking questions beyond quoting the press secretary.

Here, in Minnesota, one of the gas companies got permission to raise prices, though not as much as it wanted. The gas company - XCEL - cited rising prices. Yet, at the same day, and all through the summer, there were stories about natural gas prices going down. But, no, all the reporter did was writing the outcome.

[boppers]

10. Shove it down. In the spirit of bipartisanship, we offered them lube. eom

[annabanana]

11. The phrase - *"The take-no-prisoners turn"* - makes it clear to me

that Time still hasn't admitted it's own complicity.

[calimary]

12. It's. About. Time!!!!

LONG PAST, if you ask me.

[redqueen]

13. I like the way Dunn said this:

For deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer, the more hyperbolic attacks on health-care reform this summer, which were often covered as a "controversy," flipped an internal switch. "When you are having a debate about whether or not you want to kill people's grandmother," he explains, "the normal rules of engagement don't apply." And for his boss, Anita Dunn, the aha moment came when the Washington Post ran a second op-ed from a Republican politician decrying the "32" alleged czars appointed by the Obama Administration. Nine of those so-called czars, it turned out, were subject to Senate confirmation, making them decidedly unlike the Russian monarchs. "The idea — that the Washington Post didn't even question it," Dunn says, still marveling at the decision.

The way she left it open-ended, the framing. I really like her style.

[Kind of Blue]

14. Get down, Dunn, Gibbs et al..."White House officials offer no apologies.

"The best analogy is probably baseball," says Gibbs. "The only way to get somebody to stop crowding the plate is to throw a fastball at them. They move.

Love it, thanks for posting.

[question everything]

16. When Gibbs first stared he used a lot of baseball analogy

that I dis not like.

But this one is perfect.

[Kind of Blue]

17. Yeah, I don't know much about baseball but I do get this :) n/t

[ErinBerin84]

18. Dunn was good on (Un)Reliable Sources today, despite Kurtz's mistruths

He tried to claim that the media "blew the whistle" on the death panels, which really was more of the exception than the rule...I remember the press presenting it like "another side"..they showed much more vitriol towards Grayson. Kurtz also tried to pretend that the White House was just mad because they got such "good coverage" during the campaign, which Dunn also called bullshit on.Furthermore, Anna Marie Cox was on, and I'm so sick of her pretending to be a progressive while kissing McCain's ass. The NY post was quoting HER the other day on Obama's nobel prize, using the "they'll give it to anyone who isn't George W Bush" line. Bleh.