After last week’s “truce,” the latest discussion in the White House vs. Fox News saga has centered on Fox News Channel’s guests, the most high-profile over the weekend being radio commentator Rush Limbaugh who appeared in a lengthy interview on “FOX News Sunday” with Chris Wallace.
On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Bob Schieffer asked White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod used a clip of the Limbaugh interview and asked, “Last week your man Robert Gibbs met with the folks at Fox News, declared a truce in this war you’ve been having with them. Was the truce broken this morning?” [Clip after the jump]
The Huffington Posts’ Sam Stein described the Limbaugh interview as “an exercise in turning the White House into a punching bag” and wrote:
Hard-hitting interview it surely wasn’t. Host Chris Wallace let Limbaugh tee off on all facets of the Obama agenda, domestic and foreign. The radio talk show accused the president of not caring about success in Afghanistan. “I know this is going to sound controversial but I don’t think he cares,” he said, before accusing Obama of “dithering” on whether or not to send more troops to the theater. Wallace let him go on, relatively uninterrupted.
Advertisement
On the flip-side of that conversation, Daniel Libit explores the plight of democratic strategists who appear regularly on Fox News. Former Bill Clinton White House counsel Lanny Davis told Libit:
“Is there a difference between Fox and MSNBC?” he asked. “You count the number of guests on Rachel [Maddow] and Keith [Olbermann] who are conservative Republicans. If you get to double digits, I’ll buy you dinner for each one.”
And Democratic pollster Doug Schoen describes his experience very positively:
“They are the most professional network of any I have dealt with,” he said. “If you are a Democrat who wants to deliver mindless talking points on Fox, it’s probably best to go to MSBNC and hope you get a chance to recite them. I think Fox encourages critical views of all sides, asks different kinds of questions and wants to have diversity of view.”
According to Libit however, some experiences have not been completely positive. Democratic direct-mail consultant Liz Chadderdon received death threats after comments she made on “The O’Reilly Factor” and now “has adopted a personal policy of not going on Hannity’s show after he was condescending to her on the air last summer.”