Brit Hume on the Fox Fight: ‘Hoist a Jolly Roger, Pull out our Daggers and Look for More Throats to Slit’

In your Monday morning Fox News vs. White House update, we have this from Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume, who tells the LATimes‘ Matea Gold: “We may be No. 1, but there is sort of an insurgent quality to Fox News. And that’s kind of our attitude: ‘Hoist a Jolly Roger, pull out our daggers and look for more throats to slit.’ This is tremendous fodder for us. My lord, we’ve been living on it.”

And from the New Yorker‘s Louis Menand:

It’s hard to kill the press, but it is not hard to chill it, and this appears to be the White House’s goal in the case of Fox. “The best analogy is probably baseball,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said-meaning that throwing a few inside fastballs, a little chin music, gets hitters to back off the plate. Maybe, but he should also remember that deliberately throwing at a batter is grounds for ejection. The state may, and should, rebut opinions that it finds obnoxious, but it should not single out speakers for the purpose of intimidating them. At the end of the day, you do not want your opponents to be able to say that they could not be heard. It may be exasperating, but that is what the First Amendment is all about.

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And Politico’s Mike Allen writes, Fox News isn’t the only target on the White House’s dartboard. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the focus of “a campaign by the White House and its allies to undermine [the] $200-million-a-year association.”

The fight with Fox News has been more pointed and sustained – and is much less likely to abate anytime soon, while the spat with the Chamber is more delicate for the White House.

And, one more clip from the Sunday shows. On “Meet the Press,” Jane Mayer, Joe Scarborough, Dan Senor and Tavis Smiley discussed the Obama administration’s approach to the news network: