Soundbite: The Press Is To Blame For White House Vs. Fox

“Where I come from, these observations would barely count as basketball-court trash talk, let alone words of war. The blame for upgrading low-level bickering to all-out combat has got to go to the press, which loves nothing better than to talk about itself. (That includes me, of course.)

To get a genuine picture of what a war on the press looks like, you can’t fan the pages of Nexis for grouchy things George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or even Richard Nixon said about reporters, newspapers, and networks. You’ve got to go back to the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt raged against the press like noisy clockwork.

– Slate’s Jack Shafer taps his contender for the ‘which President hated the press more’ parlor game that has been going on in media circles of late.

If the goal of the White House was to white noise any other news reporting out of the news cycle with their ‘war’ on Fox than I think, at this point anyway, their decision must be considered an unmitigated success! Of course, there appears to be another Somali pirate debacle on the horizon so perhaps we’ll get a temporary breather.

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