Obama snubbed FOX. They’re the only network not to get an interview this weekend. Now they’re angry, and talking about how oppressed they are.
Over the past twenty years of working in politics I’ve learned that you can either control the media or have the media control you. Specifically, when it comes to politicians, and how they should respond to the media when it gets out of control, there are two schools of thought – both are true. The first school is the Democratic school of thought. We simply must be nice to the media, and keep talking to them, regardless of how nasty they are to us, because they’ll be even nastier if we DON’T talk to them. The second, equally true, is that the media needs politicians, and thinks it needs the politicians more than it thinks politicians need the media. Thus, the media will do anything to stop itself from losing access to senior politicians in Washington.
George Bush, the son, was expert at controlling the media because he simply cut their access when they got out of line. I remember hearing from mainstream media sources in DC that their colleagues refused to criticize the Bush administration because the reporter in question couldn’t afford to lose his job. And lose his job he would if he were no longer granted access to the White House and he was a reporter covering the White House… And so it went with George Bush – he had the media eating out of his hands, for a while at least…
FOX News wouldn’t whine near so much about being snubbed by Obama if they didn’t care. They want access. If only to prove that they’re just as good as CNN, or ABC. FOX has always had an inferiority complex vis-a-vis the real news networks. At its core, FOX knows it’s simply a propaganda organ of the GOP, but at its core, FOX kinda sorta wants to be a real news network, albeit a Republican one. So it really gets their goat when they get shut out. Which only means we should be shutting them outmore often.
I found even more upsetting an article in today’s NYT that focused on the “snub” and Obama’s “revenge” for FOX not airing his speech to Congress. It was written by the same woman reporter (I forget her name and the paper’s already gone to recycle) who has been criticized before for taking gratuitous swipes at Obama. She even said something akin to how petty it is to take an eye for an eye approach, or something like that.
I didn’t have the time to dash off a letter to the editor, but someone needs to call them on taking the low road. Somebody needs to keep saying that FOX News is not a respectable news outlet, so why should any president want to appear? But I like your point better: he wanted to get his message out. It was not in his interest to try to get through the fog of their distortions.