This whole fight that Obama has started with FOX News just shows how weak and how much of a pussy he is. He obviously can't handle criticism that well. Bush ed up America for 8 years but he didn't give a about his haters. He was a tough er who didn't care what his haters said. That's what Obama needs to do. He doesn't need to give a about his haters. And Obama also needs to stop caring about being popular and liked. And I'm pretty sure that FOX News gets more than a couple million viewers. You may hate FOX News but the channel has been successful in the ratings department.
Yeah, we are all witness to how well Dubya's strategy of treating the press like pussies worked out for him and the GOP...why in the would Obama want to follow that tragedy? ...besides, Obama is just calling a spade a spade...FAUX News has marginalized itself by leaning so far to the GOP that it should not be thought of as any more of a news organization than the 700 Club....same for local stations like WOAI...
Who gives a ? Journalists ing about a guy not wanting to talk to other journalists. That really is one thing that I wish people would grasp: journalists are not remotely objective when they are talking about journalism.
Its kind of like the big uproar the media puts on when a sports star doesnt talk to them. Really it doesnt matter in any meaningful way shape or form other than for them, the journalsists themselves, and their interests.
Its pretty sad. the state department opening talks with Iran and Sudan gets less coverage than this tripe. I mean nuclear proliferation and killings similar to 1977 Cambodia or Fox News?
I like what Obama says about 0:23 seconds into this clip: "I think the American people are a lot more interested in what we're doing to create jobs or how we're hanlding the situation in Afghanistan."
Well, yes, they are.
Last edited by DarrinS; 10-22-2009 at 08:26 AM.
Seeing as you are spending so much time ing about this subject, I don't think you are a lot more interested in anything else.
Who's the milf in that clip?
Yes, were wondering when anything positive will happen.
I don't think any of you actually are more interested in Afghanistan or jobs.
Why do you say that?
If we were to go by results.. we'd think this comment was attributed to obama's whitehouse.
Tucker Carlson and the right's perpetual self-victimhood
Complaints that the media has been "silent" about Obama's "attacks" on Fox are the opposite of reality
By Glenn Greenwald
The number one rule of American politics: the greatest, most insatiable need of the standard conservative is to turn themselves into oppressed little victims. In The Daily Beast today, Tucker Carlson devotes his entire column to complaining that Obama is "bullying" Fox News, absurdly claiming that the White House and liberals are trying "to use government power to muzzle opinions they don't agree with." Needless to say, Carlson doesn't say a word about the endless -- and far worse -- attacks by the Bush White House on a whole array of media outlets, ones that went far beyond mere criticisms.
But far more delusional is Carlson's central complaint: that "the press decide[d] to go along with all of this" -- meaning Obama's criticisms of Fox. He echoes the typical, woe-is-us conservative whine: "Why is the press corps giving the White House a pass for behavior it would never have tolerated from other administrations?" He righteously condemns what he calls "the press corps' shameful silence" on the Obama/Fox conflict and alleges that "hardly anyone in the press says a word" about this matter.
Is Tucker Carlson lying or just completely ignorant of the subject matter on which he's opining? The press has been anything but "silent" about this. It's been a virtual consensus from establishment pundits and journalists of every type that the Obama White House is doing something terribly wrong by criticizing Fox. And as usual for the vapid, group-think, script-repeating, mindless wind-up dolls who compose the Beltway press corps, they even have their own endlessly repeated pla udes for condemning Obama's criticisms of Fox: it's Nixonesque. Enemies List. Also as usual, they are echoing the theme propounded by Karl Rove on Fox: "We heard this before from Richard Nixon. And we have this White House prone to that kind of at ude. . . . This is the White House engaging in its own version of the media Enemies List."
The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus wrote two items condemning the Obama White House, saying it has "a Nixonesque -- Agnewesque aroma" and that the Fox criticisms were "dumb" and "weak." Intoning underneath a photo that read: "President Obama's ENEMIES," CNN's Anderson Cooper said: "this White House is starting to look like another White House" -- meaning Nixon's -- "and the comparisons are not flattering." Just yesterday on NPR, NPR's Ken Rudin condemend the Fox criticisms as "Nixonesque" and accused liberals of cheering on an "enemies list," while The New York Times' David Carr sat beside him and said the President was being "heavy-handed." CNN's David Gergen urged the White House to cease attacking Fox, and "even on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' Monday, the panelists largely came out against the White House's war against Fox News." Frequent Fox News critic David Zurawick of The Baltimore Sun condemned the criticisms and "compared the current administration to the White House of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew." Numerous other media figures have sung the same tune.
All that hand-wringing rhetoric: why? Because the Obama administration threatened to criminally prosecute Fox? Or because the adminstration surveilled its reporters' telephone calls? Or illegally obtained their telephone records? Or shot missiles at hotels in which they were staying? Or dropped bombs on their offices? Or imprisoned them for years without charges? Or barred Fox reporters from riding on administration planes? Or conspired to "weed out" any critical voices from being heard on network and cable news programs? No, those are all things that the Bush administration did to reporters (see the links) -- all well above and beyond the numerous, constant rhetorical attacks from the Bush White House on media organizations they perceived to be hostile. Where was Tucker Carlson when that was happening, or Ruth Marcus, or Anderson Cooper, or David Carr?
There has been a horde of media figures rushing to condemn the Obama administration merely for criticizing Fox's "reporting." Many of these same media figures -- probably most -- were silent in the face not only of identical Bush White House attacks on reporters they disliked, but far more serious and actual threats to press freedom over the last eight years.
Yet perpetual self-victimizer Tucker Carlson has to ignore all these facts -- literally pretend they don't exist -- and completely reverse reality, all so he can whine about how unfair everything is to conservatives like him, how the BigBadLiberalMedia won't criticize Obama even though they were so terribly and harshly critical of Bush. Just compare actual reality to Carlson's complaints about "the press corps' shameful silence" and his claim that "hardly anyone in the press says a word" about Obama's criticisms of Fox. That huge, disturbing and disturbed disparity illustrates howpetulant conservatives literally create their own demented reality, where they always get to be the put-upon victims.
UPDATE: The New York Times reports that when the White House tried to exclude Fox from a round of interviews with Treasury Department official Kenneth Feinberg, "Fox’s television news compe ors refused to go along," insisting that Fox be included. Even Charles Krauthammer, on Fox, praised the media for standing up for Fox: "what happened today was other news organizations -- admirably and on principle -- standing up and saying no." And Fox News itself credited NBC White Correspondent
Savannah Guthrie as "the first reporter to hold President Obama to account for his aides' 'attacks' on Fox News," when she questioned him with hostility about the criticisms.
Numerous establishment journalists have strongly condemned the Obama White House for its criticisms of Fox -- exactly the opposite of Carlson's complaints. The discrepancy between that behavior and their conduct towards the Bush White House's press attacks also demonstrates, as usual, that reality is the exact opposite of the Right's incessant and petulant complaints about "The Liberal Media."
What "controlling the media" really means
The same media whining over criticisms of Fox was happy to be bullied and controlled by the Bush administration.
By Glenn Greenwald
(updated below)
Hypocrisy is far too common a feature of our political culture to comprehensively chronicle, particularly when there is a change of party control and each side starts doing exactly that to which they spent the last several years vociferously objecting; see here for a vivid example of that dynamic, from a new Pew poll released today:
The belief that the press should keep political leaders from doing things that should not be done often depends on who those political leaders are, or more specifically, which party controls the White House. Currently, in the midst of the Obama administration, two-thirds of Republicans (65%) support the so-called "watchdog role" for the press, compared with 55% of Democrats. But last year, while Bush was still in office, only 44% of Republicans felt it was good that press criticism keeps political leaders honest, and Democrats were much more pro watchdog (71% supported press criticism). This partisan pattern has existed since the question was first asked by Pew Research in 1985.With hypocrisy that pervasive, who could ever hope to take note of all of it? Still, the complaints from America's Right -- and especially former Bush officials -- that the Obama administration is attempting to "control the media," all because the White House criticizes Fox News, is in a class of hypocrisy all by itself. That those petulant complaints are being amplified by a virtually unanimous press corps -- "it's Nixonian!" is their leading group-think cliché -- makes it all the more intolerable.
John Cole itemizes just some of the measures adopted by the Bush White House to manipulate, control, punish and bully the very few media outlets which were ever hostile to it -- each of those Bush measures, standing alone, is infinitely more invasive and threatening than the mild and perfectly appropriate criticisms of Fox coming from the Obama White House. Indeed, the Bush White House did exactly the same thing with NBC as the Obama White House is doing with Fox, and virtually all of the media stars who today are so righteously lamenting the "attacks on Fox" said nothing. Worse, the very same Bush official who this week said it was "like what dictators do" for the Obama White House to criticize Fox -- Dana Perino -- herself stood at the White House podium a mere two years ago and did exactly that to NBC News.
But the Bush administration did far worse to media outlets than merely criticize them. They explicitly threatened to prosecute New York Times journalists -- to criminally prosecute them -- for reporting on Bush's illegal spying program aimed at American citizens. They imprisoned numerous foreign journalists covering their various wars. The administration's obsessive and unprecedented secrecy -- Cheney refused to disclose even the most basic information about his whereabouts, his meetings, or even the number of staff members he had -- was the ultimate form of media control. And what was the Pentagon's embedding process other than an attempt to control media coverage and ensure favorable reporting? One will search in vain for much media protests about any of that.
But it was the Bush Pentagon's "military analyst"/domestic propaganda program that was, far and away, the most egregious case in a long, long time of a White House attempting to control media content and political coverage in the United States. And with very rare exception, not a single television network or cable news program ever even mentioned any of that -- despite David Barstow's having won the Pulitzer Prize for uncovering it -- because all their networks were implicated by it. To see how extreme a form of "media control" that was, just look at what the Bush Pentagon itself said it was doing.
As part of that propaganda program, the Bush DOD -- as they put it -- "develop[ed] a core group from within our media analyst list of those that we can count on to carry our water." They then fed those water-carriers with exclusive, secret tips about what the Government was doing, to ensure that TV programs would be forced to rely only on pro-Bush sources -- armed with "exclusives" -- while ignoring their critics. Here's how the Director of DoD Press Operations explained that tactic in a memo to key Rumsfeld aides, including Larry DiRita, the top Pentagon spokesman:
By providing them with key and valuable information, they become the key go to guys for the networks and it begins to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts by the networks themselves . . . .The Bush Pentagon had a program "to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts" from appearing on television networks. That would ensure not only that on-air pundits were "carrying water" for the Bush White House, but also that the networks' story choices and coverage of military matters would be shaped by those same water-carriers, since the networks' military analysts "have a huge amount of influence on what stories the network decides to cover proactively with regard to the military. . . . " It's hardly possible to imagine a more blatant effort to "control the media" than that. There is nothing the Obama White House has done regarding the media that even comes close.
Whatever else is true, Fox has taken on a political role that is very rare, at least in modern times, for a large American news organization. Its news coverage is not merely biased or opinionated; there'd be nothing unusual about that. Instead, it is a major participant -- the leading participant -- in organizing, promoting and fueling protests, including street protests, against the government. Fox has undertaken a role typically played by media outlets in, say, Venezuela or various unstable, under-developed countries -- sponsoring rather than reporting on protests against the government -- and it is difficult to recall any recent example that is similar.
Fox has every right to do that, but the pretense that it is a news organization is ludicrous -- transparently so -- and there isn't anything remotely wrong with the Obama White House saying so. Even those with high tolerance levels for blatant double standards should have a very hard time watching Bush officials of all people -- along with their media-star allies -- whine about criticisms of Fox coming from the White House, when the prior eight years were marked by an administration that attempted to dominate and control media coverage more than any in modern history, along with a media that seemed perfectly content, even happy, to be controlled.
Blame Bush!
Comparison isn't blaming.
how' s your knees whiney they holding up? you look ridiculous trying to defend this .
More fantasies. Have fun.
I'm not defending anything. Just providing a little perspective. Is that offensive to you?
Your not try to provide perspective you twit, your trying to legitamize an outrageous reach, and abuse of the state.
you're a hypocrite
Compared to threatening the NYT with prosecution, putting journalists on the payroll to pimp policy, wiretapping unfriendly reporters and rounding up a bunch of retired military to spoonfeed the American public war propaganda (and pimp military pork) on cable TV, Obama's criticism of Fox doesn't seem too serious to me, even if it is ill-advised.
This is an abuse of state, how?
Last edited by Winehole23; 10-23-2009 at 08:32 PM.
don't forget the gay porn star plant...
.but,but,but, obama hates fox news and i'm a hypocrite waaahhh!
Jeff Gannon.
Criticism.... you're ing delusional and a liar.You're not even original, although you never have been, as always you just parrot the line that come out of the WH. denial denial denial denial denial.
What did I deny?
I still wonder who that dude was giving 'exclusives' too...had to be Karl Rove...
Sometimes news orgs don't get all the access to government they want. Wah.
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