Why Declaring War on Fox News Could Be a Mistake for Obama

[Commentary] Over the weekend, White House communications director Anita Dunn announced the official beginning of the Obama administration's war with Fox News. Of course, the battle has been openly brewing for months now. Even during the campaign, Obama's team gave up on sending surrogates to the network. "It was beyond diminishing returns," Dunn told the New York Times. "It was no returns." But now the war is out in the open. "We're going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent," she told the paper. "As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don't need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave." Yesterday on CNN, she clarified: "Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party." The White House's logic seems to be that there's no point in trying to be fairly portrayed on Fox News. Even if they send administration officials to try and reason with its hosts and viewers, the way the information gets presented eliminates any net benefit. (Especially when hosts like Glenn Beck make up facts and present them as sincere truth — the Times cited a moment when even fellow Fox reporters were angered that Beck claimed Fox White House correspondent Major Garrett was "never called on" in the briefing room, when he had in fact been called on that very day.) It's also helpful to have a foil to fight against. In the continuing effort to portray tea partiers and birthers and the like as a sort of faux-patriotic lunatic fringe, the act of isolating Fox is an easy way to draw some lines in the sand.