MEDIA VS. POLITCS: Obama and Fox come to Blows

As many of us know, the Obama administration recently aimed its sites on the conservative news outlet, FOX news. While many of us in the progressive camp have been sounding off for years about the inherent conservative bias of its talking heads, to have an official from the executive branch criticize the newsworthiness of a particular media source forces us to ask some difficult questions. This move, I fear, will merely stoke the fires of conservatism, as it reifies the fears many Americans share about a growing “imperialistic” presidency (in this case, Obama). Also, the issue beckons us to ask what, if any, is the substantial difference between FOX news and other 24-hr media outlets like CNN. How should we, as progressively minded citizens, weigh in on this issue? Can we simply stand by the administration’s position because they are “on our side”? I would suggest a more critical stance here, once we consider the implications of this kind of political discourse.
In liberal circles during the Bush years, it was not uncommon to speak of an imperial presidency. Senators on the floor of the Chamber openly called for Bush’s impeachment, naming him “dictator.” Certainly, the preemptive invasion of Iraq, the claims of torture at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, and the infiltration of privacy from the Patriot Act warned many citizens of the growing independence of the executive branch. Today’s political climate exhibits a clear reversal of the political mood where the conservatives jeer the president’s policies as arrogant and unconstitutional and liberals cheer the moves as necessary to combat the woes of our society. However one sees the situation, when a sitting president attacks the integrity of a single news source, we must all pay attention to the implications from both sides. In one sense, FOX news does contain an inherent conservative bias, not only in its editorial programming but in its reporting as well. The Glenn Beck’s of the world do employ rhetoric that constructs Obama and “liberals” as the great enemy of America, encouraging a political climate ruled by emotion rather than the exploration of carefully reasoned positions. As long as Obama is president, according to this view, the country is headed for trouble. Our culture, these pundits would have us believe, stands in the balance, for the American way is disintegrating. Such fears are nothing new. Huey Long, former governor of Louisiana, deployed radical rhetoric in his attacks on Roosevelt during the Great Depression. And, indeed, in our own day, liberal critics have often chosen to characterize former VP Cheney as a dark, malevolent figure pulling the strings of the Bush White House. Still, the issue for all these parties is the freedom of the press, guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Conservatives fear the overtures of the Obama administration are the first almost imperceptible moves to censor public opposition to its policies. And, frankly, as reasonable thinkers, we should consider the implicit concerns here. While not overtly seeking to censor debate, Obama’s staff has taken up the mission of painting FOX as a dubious source. I see this as an indication that public discourse has now largely abandoned reasonable thinking and given way to attacking persons and organizations as simply “evil.” If Bush had directly attacked CNN or ABC as reporting propaganda and not news, liberals undoubtedly would have viewed this as an attempt to interrupt the free press. We, as progressives, need to remember this. After all, while the present form of media might not service our critical thinking skills, the press is still nominally free to choose and, indeed, “distort” the stories reported as they see fit. When a president openly questions the integrity of a news outlet, he is questioning the integrity of the total institution of the press, and this should always arouse the attention of those that support free-thinking. CNN and others certainly employ their own talking heads, albeit somewhat less radical, and construct reporting that chooses some stories rather than others. This is an unavoidable reality of the politics of information in a media-saturated society such as ours. The onus, unfortunately, is on the citizens and not our government to wade through the rhetoric and develop a reasoned position. We cannot approach politics as passive consumers that simply accept what is given to us. Instead, we must actively participate in the construction of public knowledge, lest we relinquish our right to think to the talking heads on our TVs, our radios, and in Washington.