Never wrestle in the mud with a pig; he likes it

There’s an expression down South. Goes something like this. Never wrestle in the mud with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it.
Fox News is President Barack Obama’s pig. (In the interest of fairness, MSNBC was George W. Bush’s.)
So why has Obama’s administration publicly declared war on a network watched by people who didn’t vote for him and never will – even if he walked on water, shoved his U.S. birth certificate down their throats and organized his own tea parties?
Perhaps the White House’s mudfest with Fox is to divert attention away from the fact that Obama’s presidential honeymoon is over and now much of the gloss has worn off his lacquer.
He’s nearly 300 days in office and now must be judged by how he governs.
Obama remains a political tour de force and has made inroads on improving the economy and reforming health care. But he also has embraced the same lack of transparency that his predecessor did. (He snubs critics in the media and travels mostly to blue states with an eye toward 2012). On the up side, it’s a safe bet that Obama will never embarrass our nation the way George W. Bush routinely did. (“The Pet Goat” is not on Obama’s reading list, and a camera will never catch him sneaking up on the German chancellor and giving her an uninvited and creepy shoulder massage.)
“We’re going to treat them [Fox] the way we would treat an opponent,” White House Communications Director Anita Dunn recently told The New York Times. “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.”
Obama’s White House needs to declare war on the recession, unemployment, expensive health care and terrorism – not on a television network.
Yet, Dunn later piled on by telling CNN, “Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.”
Other than watching our broadcast news partners over at 11 Connects, WJHL, I have cut mightily into my non-local-news-television-viewing habits over the past several months, owed in part to a desire to read books but primarily to the realization that Newton N. Minow was right.
The Federal Communications Commission chairman said in 1961: “When television is good, nothing – not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers – nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.”
I couldn’t watch CNN and MSNBC at home if I wanted to because Bristol Virginia Utilities’ basic TV package doesn’t include them. (When the economy goes south, you have to make some tough personal budgetary decisions.) My TV package does include Fox News, however, and I do watch occasionally.
I don’t see overt bias from its journalism-trained news reporters. But the network’s popular talk-show hosts Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity are as objective as Attila the Hun.
Please don’t read this next sentence as elitist, because I know plenty of stupid people with college degrees and plenty of brilliant ones with GEDs. But I find it fascinating that Beck, Hannity and Rush Limbaugh – the most rabid conservative talk-show hosts – have two things in common: They all are multimillionaires AND college dropouts. The latter would disqualify them from working $25,000-a-year newspaper reporting jobs, by the way.
They’re obviously immensely talented, don’t get me wrong. But too many Americans confuse entertainers with educators. Glenn, Sean and Rush are not journalists and are under no obligation to correct their errors, such as these two recent doozies, reported by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact.com, by Beck: 45 percent of doctors “say they’ll quit” if health care reform passes, and John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, “has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.”
Charles M. Madigan, the presidential writer in residence at Roosevelt University, wrote a great essay Friday that summed up Beck. “The problem with Beck, then, is not his narrative, which is entertainingly foolish to anyone who actually knows anything about anything. The problem is the size of the audience in the United States that actually knows nothing about nothing. This mass (my guess, about 12 percent of the electorate) is easily moved, the past summer and its continuing silly rhetoric on all kinds of issues indicate. They wear know-nothingness like a badge.”
Beck, Limbaugh and Hannity are great examples of the American dream. So is Bill Gates, who also dropped out of college.
But the rest of us truth-seekers need information from dissenting sources. Only then does the truth begin to take its real shape.
When a smart, decent but slumping president dives in the mud to battle biased TV talkers, he diminishes himself and his office.
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On a personal note, I want to wish a happy seventh birthday to my oldest child, Tyler. Happy birthday, Little Man!

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at jfoster@bristolnews.com or (276) 645-2513.