In next week’s Time magazine, Michael Scherer writes about the White House’s full court press…on the press, especially Fox News:
The general in this war is Anita Dunn, 51, a veteran campaign strategist who arrived at the White House in May. …she has become a devoted consumer of conservative-media reports and a fierce critic of Fox News, leading the Administration’s effort to block officials, including Obama, from appearing on the network. “It’s opinion journalism masquerading as news,” Dunn says. “They are boosting their audience. But that doesn’t mean we are going to sit back.” Fox News’s head of news, Michael Clemente, counters that the White House criticism unfairly conflates the network’s reporters and its pundits, like Glenn Beck, whom he likens to “the op-ed page of a newspaper.”
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs uses a baseball analogy describing how the White House plays offense: “The only way to get somebody to stop crowding the plate is to throw a fastball at them. They move.”