The "War" Between Obama and Fox News

When communications director Anita Dunn characterized Fox News as the "research and communications wing of the Republican Party" it set off a virtual war between the administration and the network. Watch:

Much commentary has been devoted to it of late with news orginizations and journalists picking sides. With some on the one hand, like Jacob Weisberg of Newsweek, going so far as to call FNN

un-American, and others, like Jake Tapper of ABC and more surprisingly Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune openly defending them, most shied away from being so direct and chose to analyze the conflict with a semi-objective tone (NYT)

This conflict raises a lot of questions. Firstly "is Fox in fact news?" (videos of The Ten Most Egregious Fox News Distortions on Huffington Post) begs the question what is news and who has the responsibility of reforming it when it goes out of its bounds. In countries like America where, except for PBS, all news organizations must survive on ad revenues, the moral standards are set by shareholders and ratings. Within the groupthink that develops out of competing in this framework even the most high-minded journalists are forced to make a choice between emotive journalism and marginalization. So Fox plays the game without really pretending that its not a game, and they play extremely well. Others are forced to follow suit though they can't be quite as honest in their dishonesty. Fox took a sublte hypocrisy and turned it into blatant, in your face irony. For example take Charles Krauthammer, a frequent contributor and commentator on Fox, whose recent article said this about the Obama Administration's tactics of late:

Factions should compete, but they should also recognize the legitimacy of other factions and, indeed, their necessity for a vigorous self-regulating democracy. Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimize and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian.

Their commentator Glenn Beck can go on a morning show and say "Obama hates white people", they often fanned the flames of the birther debate, and Roger Ailes, the CEO of Fox, actually worked for Nixon and set many of those policies. They say Obama is Nixonian when he makes a move against them.