What's a news operation?

Last week and over the weekend the White House announced that it did not consider Fox News to be a real news operation but instead the research arm of the Republican Party. They urged everyone else to stop treating Fox as a news operation. What does this mean?

Since the days of LBJ, every administration eventually decides that the press is out to get it and goes into bunker mode where it treats the press as hostile. The Obama administration adopted this attitude about portions of the press and the media in general almost before the inaugural balls had ended. Only a couple of weeks into his administration, President Obama admonished House Republicans to stop listening to Rush Limbaugh. The Obama made other statements indicating that they considered Rush to be the head of the Republican Party.

Others have been trashed along the way, either by the President personally or by White House staffers. The current target is Glenn Beck. When asked for examples of Fox bias, the White House mentioned the 5 pm time slot - Glenn Beck.

It is understandable that the Obama administration doesn't like Beck. He has been digging up dirt on Obama appointees, especially the czars who don't have to go through a confirmation process. The White House wants to marginalize Beck. Currently the dirt he digs up gets picked up by Fox News and conservative columnists. The idea is to quarantine Beck and Fox. When they ask other news operations to stop treating Fox as one of them, they mean that they want the rest of the media to stop picking up stories generated by Beck. This is nothing more than an administration asking the media to censor itself of stories that are damaging to the President.

The White House charge that Fox is biased is laughable. All of the news operations are biased. Five years ago CBS allowed a producer to cap a multi-year crusade against President Bush with a story that depended on Xeroxed documents that an informant said were passed to him by an unknown woman at a rodeo. CNN felt the need to fact check an SNL sketch that made President Obama look bad. Keith Olbermann has been giving angry editorials under the heading of "special reports" for years. Also, he tends to name conservatives as the Worst Person in the World so often that it has become a badge of honor. But, according to the White House, only Fox is biased.

This is another way of favoring friendly news organizations over hostile ones which is an old political tradition. The difference this time is that the Obama administration is trying to appear clean when their real purpose is to bury damaging stories.

Something that Obama and his administration yet has to learn is that it is difficult to muzzle the press. Efforts to do so simply spotlight whatever they are trying to cover up. Fox's ratings are way up. MSNBC's are down.