Media Cheer White House’s Two-Minute Hate

If the Bush administration had spent two consecutive weeks urging the nation's media to ignore anything reported by, say, The New York Times because the paper obviously had it in for the White House, the resulting chorus of outrage would have broken your eardrums.

Americans would have been told, for the umpteenth time, that crypto-fascists like Dick Cheney were trying to stifle dissent, that the White House had no business telling the press how to do its job, and that anybody who said otherwise was just an epaulet or two away from goose-stepping down Berlin's Tiergartenstrasse.

Recall, for instance, the sustained uproar that ensued shortly after 9/11 when Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleisher said people needed to "watch what they say." Encapsulating the general tenor of anti-Fleisher denunciations, The Times' own Paul Krugman took the statement as an "ominous" warning "to accept the administration's version of events, not ask awkward questions."

(For the record, Fleisher didn't suggest anything of the sort. It's clear from the transcript of the news conference he was criticizing not only comedian Bill Maher's remark that the 9/11 perpetrators were courageous, but also GOP Rep. John Cooksey's comment that anyone wearing "a diaper on his head and a fan belt around that diaper" should be investigated. As usual, the facts soon fell by the wayside.)

Well. Recently the Obama admininistration has been suggesting that because Fox News is heavily slanted (true), it is therefore not a real news outlet (false) -- and that other media organizations should therefore steer clear of anything Fox reports.

The White House Web site even maintains a "Reality Check" feature on its Briefing Room blog to make point-by-point rebuttals of assertions by Fox figures such as Glenn Beck. One entry concludes, "For even more Fox lies, check out the latest 'Truth-o-Meter' from Politifact . . . ." Try to imagine how the media community would have responded if the Bush White House had singled out CNN or MSNBC for routine, official truth-squading treatment. The fury would have been incandescent.

Yet the reaction from the national media to the Obama White House's campaign against Fox has been muted -- Politico calls it a "collective shrug" -- and in some cases even approving. Jacob Weisberg writes in Slate that other journalists who appear on Fox are committing an ethical breach and that Fox News "isn't just bad. It's un-American." A writer for The New Republic finds the whole discussion tedious. A blogger for The Economist draws a parallel between Fox and a Thai media big-shot whose anti-government campaign helped spark a coup. (Subtle!)

Thomas DeFrank, a veteran D.C. journalist, tells Politico he "can never remember a White House urging news organizations to boycott other news organizations. That strikes me as unprecedented." Nevertheless, it seems to be working. The other day the liberal advocacy group MoveOn joined the fray, urging members of Congress to boycott Fox for the next year, just as the White House has.

There have been a few murmurs of disapproval. The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus says the war on Fox News is "dumb" -- not because it is wrong, mind you, but merely because it diverts attention from the more important business of achieving the president's lofty policy goals.

Marcus concedes that "at worst," the anti-Fox campaign "has a distinct Nixonian . . . aroma." That's close, but not quite right. It has a distinct Orwellian aroma: It calls to mind the Two-Minute Hate used to whip Party members in Oceania into a frenzy of seething rage against Them.

The advantage of whipping the party rank-and-file into a frenzy against Them is that the rank-and-file cease to dwell on any shortcomings they might have perceived in You. The White House's war on Fox makes for savvy politics: It solidifies the liberal base by triggering the dynamic of the old Arabic proverb: "I against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin; but my cousin and I against the stranger." So far the strategy seems to have worked like a charm. Which says a lot about where most of the media stand politically.

Maybe this would all be making a mountain out of a molehill if the war on Fox were an isolated episode. But it constitutes just one piece in an emerging pattern. We have already seen the Obama administration try to use the NEA to mau-mau artists into cranking out agitprop on behalf of White House polices. We have seen it censor mailings by the Humana insurance company critical of health care reform -- a position from which it had to climb down late last week. We have heard White House communications director Anita Dunn boast about how Team Obama drove the narrative of campaign coverage: "It was very much we controlled it, as opposed to the press controlled it."

Media reaction to most of this? Shrug.

There hasn't even been much concern that Hollywood has launched a week-long propaganda campaign inspired by the president's call to public service. According to the Los Angeles Times, "the message will be nearly ubiquitous, starting in the morning with programs such as 'Today' and 'The View,' and then echoed on soap operas, prime-time series, and late-night shows . . . ."

That's quite a departure from Hollywood's posture during the previous eight years, when films from "Rendition" to "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith" routinely called into question the Bush administration's initiatives at home and abroad. Obama has carried forward many of those initiatives, from extraordinary rendition to indefinite detention without trial. But Hollywood suddenly seems to have lost its taste for speaking truth to power.

That's why the war on Fox, while politically savvy, is nearly superfluous. The administration doesn't need to warn other media against asking awkward questions. Most of them no longer do -- even when the White House goes after one of their own.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.

Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or .