New York Times media reporter Jeremy Peters unwittingly revealed the widespread liberal bias of the media in Thursday's report on how the Fox News Channel has really gotten under President Obama's skin: "Jokes About Fox News Creep Into Obama's Comments as the Campaign Heats Up."
Few things seem to pique President Obama like Fox News.
Consider some recent barbs from the campaign trail. At a bar in Ohio where a television was tuned to Fox News, the president joked that one of the customers should ask to change the channel. “The customer is always right,” Mr. Obama cracked.
Last week he used the network as a punch line in his stump speech, saying that “Uncle Jim” -- a fictional amalgam of his conservative critics -- was “a little stubborn and been watching Fox News.”
Then there was an interview with Valerie Jarrett, one of Mr. Obama’s senior advisers. Ms. Jarrett was asked why some voters had the impression that the president was attacking the rich. “Well, they may be watching one particular network,” she sniffed. “CNN?” the interviewer teased.
None of this has gone unnoticed inside the studios and executive suites of Fox News, which is rebuffing these White House put-downs as a denigration of the presidency.
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Fox News and the Obama White House have never enjoyed a warm relationship. But after a caustic feud erupted in late 2009, the two seemed to agree to coexist peacefully. Glenn Beck, the incendiary host who called the president a racist, left after a falling-out with executives. The Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes, professed to be steering the network toward a “course correction,” an acknowledgment that it had shifted too hard to the right.
But now, with the presidential campaign entering its most competitive phase, the simmering tensions between Mr. Obama and the country’s highest-rated news channel threaten their fragile détente.
But whether he realizes it or not, Peters's analysis says more about the stark lack of Obama-scandal coverage in the liberal media than it does about slant at Fox News.
Turn on Fox News and much of the coverage is focused on stories that are unflattering to the White House. Far more than any other network, it chronicles daily developments in the scandal over Operation Fast and Furious, which involves a botched federal gun-tracking operation that has become a cause célèbre among conservatives. A Congressional investigation into the matter -- another news event that has received careful attention on Fox -- resulted in a contempt vote in the House of Representatives against Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. Fox News was the only cable news network early on to carry proceedings from the contempt hearings live.
The details of the bankruptcy of Solyndra, an alternative energy company that received $528 million in federal loan guarantees after heavily lobbying the White House, are well known to regular Fox viewers. So far this week, the story dominating Fox newscasts has been the conservative furor over a recent remark by the president that business owners owed much of their success to government investment.
By contrast, the Media Research Center documented that it took five days for the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks to even notice Obama's remark from last Friday denigrating individual initiative: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that; somebody else made that happen.”
