With the president's popularity continuing to drop thanks to yet another fiscal crisis created by the fact that Senate Democrats have not passed any sort of budget since 2009, President Obama decided to lash out at a favorite target: Fox News Channel.
In highly partisan remarks he delivered at a Maryland community college, Obama lashed out at the nation's most-watched cable news outfit, seemingly blaming it alone for the unpopularity of his signature health insurance law.
“But you don’t have to take my word for it,” he asserted. “If you talked to somebody who said, ‘I don’t know, I was watching Fox News and they said it’s horrible,’ and you can say, you know what, don’t take my word for it.” He then repeatedly promoted a website that the government had set up as the only real way to find the truth about Obamacare.
Given the tremendous amount of hatred and anger that many far-left individuals have against Fox News, it is quite possible that Obama's potshot was merely the product of his own personal pique but it could very well be the return of a former strategy from White House's playbook.
In 2009, shortly after Obama's inauguration, the Administration embarked upon a deliberate strategy of attacking and trying to delegitimize Fox News in the eyes of its supporters.
The attack strategy was kicked off by then-communications director Anita Dunn who attacked FNC as "more a wing of the Republican Party" than a real news operation. Her comments were quickly seconded by top Obama officials David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel. The president himself got into the act as well. The White House escalated things even further when it tried to exclude Fox from a news conference that it had invited all the other American television news operations to cover.
Things eventually settled down but with Obama desperate to turn public opinion in his favor now, it is interesting to see the Fox-bashing resume. It is also very telling that there is literally only one news operation that the Obama White House deems insufficiently abject in its coverage.
