Now on Fox: When Presidents Attack

In September of 1970, Vice President Spiro Agnew lashed out against the national news media in a now famous speech to the California GOP state convention. The "nattering nabobs of negativism" covering the Nixon White House, Agnew said, were "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history." The speech won him few friends in the national press corps.

Agnew's comments were more than just a symptom of the well-documented—and some would say well-founded—paranoia that gripped the Nixon White House. They were an attempt to rally the Republican base into disbelieving what the national media said about the administration and its policies. Arguably, it helped. Nixon did, after all, carry 49 states in 1972. Now the Obama White House has ripped a page from Nixon's playbook and is labeling Fox News a "propaganda machine" and attempting to cast doubts on its coverage.

As Agnew's attacks on the national press corps moved the GOP base, the White House appears confident its Fox attacks will work to rally Obama's supporters, who believe the network is biased against them and their objectives. How this translates into support for the president's agenda remains an open question.

Obama's two main legislative priorities, the cap-and-trade energy tax bill and healthcare reform, face rough sledding on Capitol Hill. A move to push healthcare forward in the Senate stalled Wednesday when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid failed to get cloture on a measure freezing reductions in Medicare reimbursements to doctors and hospitals. No matter how Fox reports on this or on any other measure that has the administration's support, opponents are able to communicate their own messages directly with the American public, and in nanoseconds.

This is part of the new political reality that politicians and the media have to learn to deal with. Advances in technology have made it possible to send more information to more people in less time than even the most anti-Nixon producer at CBS could have dreamed of back in 1970.

The news side of Fox, very likely having been tougher on Obama than its broadcast and cable competitors, has made itself a target for White House scorn. By arguing that Fox has an agenda, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs seems to believe he will, for a time at least, create a shield to deflect questions other news organizations might raise about things Fox reports. He is following in the footsteps of Nixon Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, who tried to defuse questions about Watergate by saying they were the product of Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee's prior closeness to Jack Kennedy and well-established animosity toward Nixon.

The "Ziegler approach" is a risky tactic. It will fall apart if Fox starts reporting news that the other networks will be forced to cover, just as the investigations into Watergate began to snowball once Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein started breaking stories that were so significant no other news organization could ignore them.

There are those who suggest the White House is attacking Fox because the administration is losing policy debates. The White House, House GOP Leader John Boehner said Thursday, is "following a familiar pattern: When you can't win an argument based on the facts, launch vicious political attacks." True or not, the attacks on Fox, like the White House's open criticism of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its other political opponents, indicate the era of post-partisanship is over, replaced by a new spirit of "hardball," which—as the folks in TV used to say—can be seen on another network.

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