The Obama administration has declared war on Fox News. In the past week, senior White House aides have slammed Rupert Murdoch's popular cable channel, insisting that Fox is a stooge of the Republican Party and that other media outlets should not follow its stories.
Recently, Barack Obama went on every Sunday news show in the US -- except Fox News. And last week, his Treasury Department tried to exclude Fox reporters from covering a press conference.
Of course, feuds between presidents and journalists are nothing new.
In 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt was so upset by an isolationist reporter's coverage of World War II that he "awarded" him a Nazi Iron Cross at a press conference. In 1963, John F. Kennedy called on the publisher of The New York Times to pull war correspondent (and future Pulitzer-prize winning journalist) David Halberstam from Vietnam after he wrote increasingly bad news reports.
In 1970, Richard Nixon's vice-president, Spiro Agnew, lambasted the press as a bunch of "nattering nabobs of negativism". And during the 1992 election campaign, George H.W. Bush famously showed a placard reading: "Annoy the media: re-elect Bush".
What makes the latest stoush different is that Mr Obama wants to not only delegitimise any significant dissent, but isolate a media network that represents the thoughts and attitudes of a significant segment of the American community.
White House communications director Anita Dunn, who rates Mao Zedong as one of her favourite philosophers, said of Fox: "We're going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent."
That is not how democracies are supposed to work. It would be akin to John Howard launching a vendetta against The Age, simply because he did not agree with its editorial positions.
Now, there is no question that Fox News is far more conservative than other networks. Its prime-time voices are perpetually angry right-wingers such as Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck. And chief executive and chairman Roger Ailes has consistently said programming reflects a mission to balance a left-wing bias of the elite media.
But this also explains why Fox News has grown dramatically since its creation in 1996 and why it drives Democratic partisans right off the deep end. Rightly or wrongly, it is seen by an increasingly large viewership as a welcome corrective to a mainstream media (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times) which leans left in a nation where conservatives, according to polls, remain the largest ideological group.
All the available evidence indicates the major US networks and newspapers reflect a left-liberal consensus. In 1992, for example, a large sample (Roper poll) of top Washington reporters, editors and bureau chiefs voted 89 per cent to 7 per cent for Bill Clinton over George H.W. Bush, even though regular Americans had voted for the Democrat over the Republican by 43 to 38 per cent.
In recent years, Fox has been called a right-wing "fifth column" (Al Gore), a "propaganda mill" (Washington Post) and "the most blatantly biased major American news organisation since the era of yellow journalism" (Los Angeles Times) that has "eliminated journalism" (legendary journalist Walter Cronkite).
The problem here is that Fox's news coverage is confused with its highly opinionated and entertaining brand of political debate.
Yet Fox's news and current affairs output and the opinions stated on Hannity, Glenn Beck and The O'Reilly Factor are kept separate in what the Americans irreverently refer to as "the separation between church and state". Fox, moreover, breaks many news stories that shame the major networks and newspapers. In 2000, it broke the story of George Bush's youthful DUI, which many Republicans believe nearly cost him the election.
In 2002, whereas much of the media hastily reported an alleged Israeli massacre of Palestinian civilians in a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin, Fox -- correctly, it turned out -- treated the massacre charge with absolute scepticism.
In 2005, it helped reveal the corruption of the UN's multi-billion-dollar oil-for-food program in Iraq, in which top UN officials accepted bribes. Much of the US media did not push the news story.
Earlier this year, it exposed White House tsar Van Jones as a September 11 conspiracy theorist.
As The Economist's editors and American watchers John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge argue: "For all (Fox's) partisanship, much of its political reporting is first-rate." In the present context, this merely means subjecting the Obama administration and Democratic congress to some tough scrutiny.
The result is that the White House is trying to silence a network that resonates with Middle America. Those attacks hurt Obama.
And they help Fox win more viewers. As Washington media insider Jeff Greenfield put it: "If Fox is feeling any pain from the White House's stance, it is crying all the way to the bank."
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