PJ-MEDIA notes some of this contentious past:
…Did the New York Times fear freedom of the press had been eradicated? No, the headline was simply that “Fox’s Volley With Obama” was … “Intensifying.”
Ironically, current CNN host and Trump critic Brian Stelter wrote the article.
It begins:
Attacking the news media is a time-honored White House tactic but to an unusual degree, the Obama administration has narrowed its sights to one specific organization, the Fox News Channel, calling it, in essence, part of the political opposition.
“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” said Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, in a telephone interview on Sunday. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”
In 2009, the White House’s position on Fox News was that it was “an opponent,” at “war(!)” with the White House. And that they were not, in fact, a legitimate news organization.
They were to be treated as fake news. It was White House policy.
INDEPENDENT JOURNAL REVIEW continues the dossier of Obama’s attack on free speech:
…In the Obama team’s eyes, Fox News was a right-wing propaganda machine. As Anita Dunn, the White House communications director at the time, put it in an appearance on CNN:
“What I think is fair to say about Fox — and certainly it’s the way we view it — is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party. They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”
Ouch. (An early version of the “fake news” attack?)
That wasn’t all. The White House used its official blog to publicly call out what it labeled “Fox lies.” Politico referred to the sharp attack from the executive branch on a news organization as “unusual.” The White House also deliberately excluded Fox News from a round robin of presidential interviews in September 2009.
Dan Pffeifer, the White House deputy communications director, defended the administration’s stance towards Fox this way:
“We simply decided to stop abiding by the fiction, which is aided and abetted by the mainstream press, that Fox is a traditional news organization.”
The New York Times wrote an entire piece about the war between the government and the network. In fact, this attitude was so prevalent, and was escalated with such ferocity, that the White House press pool (the five-network rotation that shares the costs and duties of daily coverage) finally united behind Fox News and put an end to it:
The Treasury Department on Thursday tried to make “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg available for interviews to every member of the network pool except Fox News….
But the Washington bureau chiefs of the five TV networks consulted and decided that none of their reporters would interview Feinberg unless Fox News was included.
That didn’t stop President Obama from airing his disdain for Fox News Channel. In 2010, he said in an interview that Fox News was “destructive.” In 2013, he made a joke in a speech to students at Fox News’ expense. In 2014 he told Bill O’Reilly that the network was “unfair” to him. And most recently, last year, he blamed Fox News and its viewers for Hillary Clinton’s loss….