COLUMN: Waging war against the press

In the past couple of weeks, the Obama administration has become even more Orwellian with its declaration of war against Fox News.

Fox News may have plenty of detractors, but a war against Fox is really a war against the press as a whole.

From the earliest days of the campaign, Obama and his staff have proved adept at controlling the media. White House communications director Anita Dunn bragged about this in a January speech in the Dominican Republic. She discussed how the campaign distributed recorded interviews with Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to get their message to the public.

“It was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters. We just put that out there and made them write what Plouffe had said as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it as opposed to the press controlled it," she said.

Since the election, Dunn and the rest of the administration have had a great deal of trouble controlling the troublesome Fox News network.

Recently, Obama staffers went on a media blitz in an attempt to marginalize the network.

After Dunn accused Fox of operating as the research or communications arm of the Republican Party, White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel took the war of words up a notch.

Emmanuel told CNN that President Obama does not want "the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox."

I bet he doesn’t.

After all, it was Fox News that led the way in revealing Obama’s 20-year long membership in the church of the radical Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Fox also has led coverage of Obama’s questionable affiliations with leftist, Marxist radicals like William Ayers and Van Jones. It was Fox News that extensively covered Obama’s connections with the corrupt community organization ACORN. Time after time, Fox News has made trouble for this administration by shedding light on some of the more controversial members of Obama’s inner circle.

Now, getting back to their Chicago style political roots, the White House is trying to punish Fox News. This is a strategy that can only backfire.

Any challenge to freedom of the press must be taken seriously by all media outlets. Well publicized derogatory remarks about Fox News by high ranking administration officials is a flagrant attempt to control the media by showing that anyone who publishes or broadcasts anti-Obama news will be ridiculed and demonized.

In Barrow County, there are two local papers in addition to two papers in neighboring counties which cover county politics. Imagine if there was only one source of news and that source was completely controlled by those in power.

Now imagine that happening on a national level. That is what this administration is trying to accomplish – control the media, control the message.

As George Orwell once said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

We must hope that the “revolutionary” media outlets in this country continue to report the truth regardless of the consequences.

Kristi Reed is a reporter for the Barrow Journal. She can be reached at kreed@barrowjournal.com.