The White House And Glenn Beck Agree! Mainstream Media Is Failing At Its Job

If you watch Glenn Beck with any regularity you know that he thinks the mainstream media is not doing their job (to be fair, the ACORN debacle and the NYT delayed response to it sort of suggests he’s right). Looks like the Obama administration agrees with him!

Michael Scherer has a particularly interesting piece over at Time this week about the White House’s summer of discontent with the mainstream media (the NYT and WaPo are called out in particular), its increasingly bad habit of picking up stories from Fox without doing the fact-checking, and how it has resulted in the White House deciding to hell with the media! They are going to do their own fact-checking.

All the criticism, both fair and misleading, took a toll, regularly knocking the White House off message. So a new White House strategy has emerged: rather than just giving reporters ammunition to “fact-check” Obama’s many critics, 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, like the assertion that health-care reform would establish new “sex clinics” in schools. Obama, fresh from his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, cheered on the effort, telling his aides he wanted to “call ‘em out.”

How does the White House manage to become a player? Looks like they may have finally got their own Glenn Beck (sans the chalk board) in the form of a veteran campaign strategist Anita Dunn who is a “devoted consumer of conservative-media reports and a fierce critic of Fox News, leading the Administration’s effort to block officials, including Obama, from appearing on the network.” She is also the person behind the White House blog “denunciations.”

So basically the White House is attempting to step into the deep-end of the blogosphere. Perhaps it’s inevitable — this is the Internet Presidency after all, and Obama does carry a Blackberry. But still. Is it really a good thing? Doesn’t deciding to respond to Glenn Beck et al. in kind merely elevate much of the nonsense Beck spews and simultaneously lower the White House a few rungs down the credibility ladder? Wouldn’t the more prudent approach be to figure out how Glenn Beck has out-Obama’d Obama, pinpoint what it is exactly that is so appealing about Beck and than address that fear instead (preferably with a chalk board!)? One more voice in the politico online din, even if it’s the White House’s, is going to end up being just that: one more voice.

share this post

filed under