Thanks For Being So Thin-skinned

No, there weren’t any more points to be scored when White House Communications Director Anita Dunn finally said what everybody else had already said: that the FOX news network functioned as a Republican Party outlet for propaganda; that one shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking FOX was a news network; that Obama wouldn’t grant FOX any more interviews but would drop in now and again whenever he wanted to debate the opposition. For a while there, it looked as if Obama would brush off a pesky opponent the same as he did that fly during an on-camera interview earlier this year.

These days, however, it has become clear just how little of this light-heartedness remains. The pugnacious self-confidence with which Obama once squared off against FOX pit bull Bill O’Reilly has been transformed into a sort of thin-skinned peevishness that FOX eagerly turned into a profitable mini-war with the administration. Those swipes from the Obama White House are precisely the thing the FOX network peddles as news and uses to fill its loose-knit evening talk shows. The fact that Obama’s team still hasn’t grasped the concept of the exalted podium the presidency brings with it has resulted in skeptical commentary even from Obama’s journalistic supporters. The official White House blog’s attempt to counter FOX news lies with a “fact check” seemed to New York Times media critic David Carr to be like a blog put out by “an unemployed guy living in his parents’ basement.”

Liberal and conservative observers alike uncharacteristically agree that no president has ever won the tradition-rich battle against the media. And so it was with the White House’s ultimately unproductive anti-FOX campaign: ever since Dunn’s complaints, FOX’s viewer ratings have risen some ten percent. The fact that White House criticism is right on target helps very little: neither Dunn nor Obama advisors David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel tried to claim FOX wasn’t completely within its rights to push its political agitation. The fact that the administration said it would no longer take FOX’s claims of “fair and balanced” news coverage seriously is more damaging to the network’s reputation than any slurs could be. Daily Show moderator Jon Stewart described FOX’s programming philosophy as “opiniotainment” that only works half as well when audience opinion is no longer considered news.

The insistence on one’s own definition of impartiality is a very good indicator that people no longer have much interest in objective journalism, and not only at FOX. At the other end of the political spectrum, MSNBC attempts television success with political noisemaking. Unfortunately, it has little to do with an atmosphere of constructive debate that might at least make the controversies interesting. When everyone stops screaming at one another about which network is fairest, the only thing they have left to offer is a debate consisting of each network interviewing their own “political analysts” or other brainwashed types. In the end, it seems that all the public screaming contests develop into one big closed system, to a sort of perpetual motion of resentment consisting of both sides accusing the other of being Nazis or communist dupes.

It’s probably a good sign that television is increasingly hemorrhaging credibility. Perhaps it will then lose its opinion-making function and serve, in a therapeutic sense, more as a public purgative; as a kind of national punching bag.