Crazy like a Fox

White House war on conservative cable channel boosts network's ratings, raising questions about the strategy of Obama officials

George Bullard / The Detroit News

Fox News Channel is on a roll. A smackdown with the White House has handed the cable news network loads of free publicity, as well as raw meat for its commentators.

Fox's primetime anchors like commentator Bill O'Reilly are happily making the most of the feud, bringing it up often on air, saying they are chipping away at a sensitive White House obsessed with controlling the media.

The battle with the White House was the fifth most-covered story of the week ending Oct. 25, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism index.

Meanwhile, Fox ratings rise.

The cable network's overall ratings have increased about 9 percent in the three weeks since the dust-up with the White House began, says the Nielsen Co., the leading tracker of television viewership.

Last month, the network averaged 2.16 million viewers in primetime, which considered from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. That is substantially more than MSNBC (702,000), according to analyses of data from the Nielsen rating service. The also-rans were CNN (665,000 viewers) and HLN, formerly Headline News (514,000).

"If I were sitting in the administration now, I would ask, 'What's the upside?' " says William Rustem, president of Public Sector Consultants, a research group in Lansing. "I don't see an upside for them."

To Fox's delight, other news organizations came to its defense when the White House barred Fox from a press event. That became something of a coup -- fellow networks getting in the White House's face, confirming Fox as a legitimate news organization.

CNN's Campbell Brown, a Fox rival, even questioned White House credibility in the matter. Officials are singling out Fox, as opposed to criticizing media bias in general, including liberal bias on MSNBC, she said. Elsewhere, the White House complaint is dubbed the "whine heard around the world."

The Fox hunt reached full gallop last month when senior administration officials repeatedly criticized the network.

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn called Fox a "wing of the Republican Party."

"It's really not news -- it's pushing a point of view," White House senior adviser David Axelrod told ABC's "This Week."

And White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN that "it's important not to have the CNNs and the others of the world being led and following Fox, as if what they're trying to do is (be) a legitimate news organization."

Why target a cable network, which attracts fewer viewers than broadcast networks? Cable news gets attention because it drives national politics, says Phil Power, a former Metro Detroit newspaper owner and the founder of Center for Michigan, a think tank based in Ann Arbor.

The White House fears other news groups will pick up more Fox stories critical of the administration.

More than one Fox program regularly flogs the policies of President Barack Obama, who also took hits from Fox commentators during his 2008 election campaign. The network heavily covered the misdeeds of the activist group ACORN, considered a Democratic ally, which had some of its funding eliminated by Congress earlier this fall. And it detailed the checkered activist history of Van Jones, a White House green jobs adviser who eventually resigned amid the criticism.

The New York Times and other news outlets were late in picking up those stories. To compensate, the Times last month said it would assign an editor to monitor stories in opinion media -- not good news for the Obama administration.

President-press feuds go back to George Washington. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon's expanded enemies list included journalists such as Daniel Schorr, then with CBS, and muckraking columnist Jack Anderson.

But the effort against Fox is a rare, if not unprecedented, sustained public attack on a network.

"The battles are usually not in public as this particular one has been," says Martha Joynt Kumar, professor of political science at Towson University in Maryland.

A public dispute "elevates the news organization or the reporter and develops sympathy for them because here is the power of the presidency coming down on them," says Kumar, a scholar of the presidency and author of an award-winning book, "Managing the President's Message: The White House Communications Operation."

"But in Fox's case, they love it," she adds.

Kumar and others distinguish between Fox commentators and its news reporters.

"The (Fox) guys at the White House are straight news, like Wendell Goler," Kumar says. "I've known Wendell for years and Jim Angle was once at NPR. They have people who are good reporters. Major (Garrett) was at CNN and before that at the Washington Times."

Goler, a Detroit native, was also once a White House correspondent for the Associated Press, widely respected for its straight news reporting.

"I think you can send a message by not going out of your way to provide the exclusive stuff" to Fox, says Rustem, a senior adviser in the administration of former Michigan Gov. William Milliken. "But to say a news organization is not going to have the regular access of media, I don't see what that gets you."

Others defend the attack on Fox, saying it serves a purpose.

"Even some progressives are concerned that -- if you push back on Fox News -- you just draw more attention to them and drive up their ratings, and that gives them what they want," says Jennifer Palmieri, senior vice president at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C.

"I don't think we should care whether or not their ratings go up. What you want is to pull back the curtain on their operation so you understand what's motivating them and that, in the end, they may not have that big of an impact.

"It's always a difficult balance for a White House to decide how to engage with them. Just because attacking Fox is good for their ratings doesn't mean it's bad for our side."

Power, a former Democratic board member at the University of Michigan, says he is old-fashioned in considering news as news and, separately, entertainment as entertainment. But some cable shows are political entertainment, an economic niche in which the anchors make a lot of money, he says.

Power says he would be reluctant to declare war on a media outlet like Fox: "If you're breaking stories, and you're doing a responsible and accurate job of it, who cares if you're left or right?"

Regular Fox News viewers are 39 percent Republican, 33 percent Democratic and 22 percent independent, according to the Pew Research Center. Arguably, that's a more balanced audience than CNN, where 51 percent are identified as Democratic.

Obama's attack on Fox also raises First Amendment concerns. "It's quite disturbing that any administration would want to shut off or close out the outlet for what appears to be largely ideological differences," says Lawrence Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education in New York. "I think it speaks of the inherent weakness in much of the administration's stances.

"Yeah, America still believes strongly in the First Amendment, freedom of speech, the full airing of different viewpoints," says Reed, also president emeritus of the Mackinac Center, a free-market group based in Midland. "Regardless of ideology, people resent the powers-that-be trying to shut anybody up."

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