Obama’s 4 Steps To Dissent Free TV

23 Oct, 2009 by John Hawkins

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The way that Obama is dealing with Fox News is transparently cynical. Fox News has the biggest cable news ratings. CNN and MSNBC are a joke beside of them. Moreover, while the other stations give sycophantic coverage to the Obama Administration and spend an inordinate amount of time beating up on hapless Republicans who have no power in DC, Fox is the only check in television news against the excesses of the Democratic Party. Journalists love to crow about their “watchdog role,” but other than the ones at Fox News and a few rogues like Jake Tapper at ABC, they’re all lying on their backs waiting for Obama to scratch their tum-tums.

Here’s how Obama’s attempt to delegitimize Fox is supposed to work:

1) The Obama Administration says Fox News isn’t a real news organization.

2) Liberals, who control almost every other mainstream media outlet, are supposed to nod along.

3) As a result, other news organizations are supposed to ignore the damaging stories broken by Fox because “they’re not legitimate.”

4) Then, since the other mainstream media organizations don’t do the same sort of investigative reporting on the Democrats that Fox does, the stories never go live and Obama gets a free ride from the press.

First off, the really disturbing part here is that Obama assumes the rest of the mainstream media is so servile that they’ll simply go along with this.

However, servile though they may be, Obama has overestimated his control over the liberals in the MSM. Because of that, step 2 of the process has only partially worked and that’s not good enough. The Obama Administration needs almost total acceptance of what they’re saying from the other libs in the media. If say, the Washington Post is breaking stories a few days after Fox and the New York Times never does it, then the WAPO gains an advantage over the New York Times. It works like that all through the media.

So, this is an extraordinarily old school strategy that works on the assumption that there are only a few important outlets and they can be “gatekeepers” for the news. In today’s world, it’s doomed to failure, but the fact that the Obama Administration is trying it tells you a lot about their character and how they see the world.