The Obama White House's war on Fox News heated up when President Obama appeared on five Sunday talk shows in September, but snubbed Fox's Chris Wallace. Then White House Communications Director Anita Dunn told CNN's Howard Kurtz, "Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party." On ABC's "This Week" Sunday, Obama guru David Axelrod commented on Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch's "talent for making money" -- and added that Fox News programming is "not really news."
 Such scruples, you may marvel, from the office of a president who just spent quality time on CBS's "The Late Show" with David Letterman. President Obama quipped that he appeared on the show to sneak a peak at a "heart-shaped potato." I know because I read about it on the CBS News Web page.
OK, so Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., went too far in suggesting that Obama was drafting an "enemies list." White House aides have a right to criticize a news organization, even question its credibility.
In the same vein, pundits are free to mock the administration's risible attempts to dress up its thin-skinned ways as love for unbiased reportage.
Note: This phony act has backfired. It set the stage for conservative critics at WorldNetDaily to post a January video of Dunn telling a Dominican government conference that the 2008 Obama campaign strategy focused on "making the press cover what we were saying" -- often by not talking to reporters. "It was very much, we controlled it," said Dunn, "as opposed to the press controlled it."
Dunn's idea of a good journalist then would be: a zombie.
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