It's not just Fox News
Written by Eric Boehlert
Published
Lots of reaction today to the Time piece about the White House pushing back against what it sees as a press corps that's failing to do its job; that's not adhering to traditional reporting standards. The main take-away is that the White House is targeting Fox News. But it's not Fox News exclusively.
For instance, Politico reports [emphasis added]:
Time White House correspondent Michael Scherer writes that in the face of criticism from the right, “the White House decided it would become a player, issuing biting attacks on those pundits, politicians and outlets that make what the White House believes to be misleading or simply false claims.”
But if you read the Time piece, White House advisers pointed to three specific examples of very bad journalism-- three examples that convinced them something was seriously wrong with political reporting--and two of the three came courtesy of the New York Times and the Washington Post. (The third example was more general and not attached to a specific media outlet.)
From the administration's point of view, the Beltway press corps in general is failing, and a lot of those failures seem to be driven by Fox News and the GOP Noise Machine. Meaning, those players are being allowed to push the Times and the Post around, and getting them to cover completely bogus stories, such as Obama-wants-to-indoctrinate-school-kids.
So while most of the noise today centers around the White House pushing back against Fox News, it's clear that the effort, and the administration's concern about journalism, is more encompassing that that.