There have always been factions that publish or make public oppositional political viewpoints with their own slant to a sitting President in the past, but Fox News has gone to the extreme of just propagating blatant lies.
Harry S. Truman banned reporters he disliked from his presidential yacht. Franklin Roosevelt placed his journalistic critics out of earshot at the back of the room during presidential press conferences.
No such subtleties in Barack Obama's White House. The White House is taking a full out frontal assault exposing the Fox News Channel calling quite bluntly, “their broadcasting of lies.” Of course the White House does not expect an apology from the network’s owner and driving conservative force, Rupert Murdoch.
As a response to the Fox News’s propensity to fabricate facts and inaccurate broadcasting topics for the sole purpose of showing the President in a bad light, the Obama White House gave all major networks interviews except Fox News for their Sunday talk shows. Chris Wallace of Fox News response was to simply call the White House "the biggest bunch of crybabies." (Oooooh, what a scathing editorial from this intellectual group. Is this the best that Fox News has? Name calling?)
One of the White House's main targets to date is Glenn Beck, the conservative Fox News commentator whose rants of provocative commentaries that are more often full of inaccurate and misstatements than not.
This past Wednesday, September 30, 2009, Glenn “Blowhard” Beck went on a negative rant about President Obama going to Copenhagen to try to get the Summer Olympics for Chicago. The White House’s counter attack pointed out Beck's lack of research of the subject and misinformation by referencing the financial losses Vancouver sustained hosting the Olympics. What any well read person knows is that Vancouver won't host the Olympics until 2010, and the clueless Beck should have said the Calgary Olympics.
Beck has also gone on another negative rant to say that President Obama’s confidante, Valerie Jarrett, had participated in a controversial August phone call that attempted to recruit artists to create works that promoted President Barack Obama's policies. The White House noted that Jarrett did not participate in any such call. Just another fabricated incorrect lie for the sole attempt to make the President look bad.
Now of course Beck has stated that the White House political director, Patrick Gaspard, had ties to ACORN but the Pulitzer Prize winning Web site, PolitiFact quickly debunked these claims by publishing the facts, and once again, Glenn “Blowhard” Beck, had just made up more lies to base his arguments against the President. PolitiFact has posted and debunked many false claims with regards to the White House that Glenn “Blowhard” Beck continues to repeat along with others on the Fox News Network.
As I see it, the White House has no other option but to meet these falsehoods head-on at every turn or the lies will have a tendency to take on a life of their own to be quoted by the conservative lemmings who want nothing more than to believe them to be true. The President said in his speech to Congress that he would call out those that misrepresented his record and that includes ideological news outlets like Fox News and its various commentators. "In this day and age," Dan Pfeiffer, the White House deputy communications director, added, "every falsehood must be met head-on no matter how absurd the charge or discredited the source."
Now in conclusion, I do want to caution this administrations calling every inaccurate comment a “lie” because it could end up like the old fable, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” but do not be afraid to call it what it is and do not back down from its meaning. When there's a willfully dishonest statement made by these fabricating conservative bias personalities, attack and expose the “LIES” when there is not any question in the context that it is being referred to, and do not be afraid to call it a “LIE” as an accurate use of the word.
