It’s not just that the attack is pretty unfair on the likes of Major Garrett, Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace, all accomplished journalists at Fox who play it straight. Failing to differentiate between them and Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Co is deliberately disingenuous.
The bigger point is that you’d expect the Leader of the Free Word to be, well, bigger than this. As New York magazine puts it: “Recognizing Fox as an enemy worth fighting is an admission of weakness for a president whose appeal has been partly predicated on the promise of unity. It’s hard to disagree with, from the Left, John Nichols of the Nation when he describes Obama as the “Whiner-in-Chief”.
Maybe Michael Wolff is right in surmising that Obama is simply “fulminating”. Perhaps Team Obama is trying to be cleverer than that and attempting to define Republicans: “If the White House is looking toward 2010’s midterms, or re-election in 2012, there would be worse things for it than to make an extremely polarizing channel, and hosts like Glenn Beck, the public face of the opposition.”
The thing is, though, many of Fox’s viewers are independents – and Obama will need at least some of them if he is to win re-election.
Bottom line: this is a big win for Fox and it diminishes Obama, one of whose great strengths in the campaign was being seen to occupy the high ground and remain above the fray.
