On Fox News Sunday this past weekend, host Chris Wallace complained live on air about the fact that though the Obama administration was making available Secretaries of State and Defense Hillary Clinton and Bob Gates, respectively, for interviews on the competing news shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC, they were not being available to him or the viewers of FNS.
It was another example of the uneasy relationship that the White House has with the conservative leaning network, which ranks at the top of the ratings of all cable news outlets.
President Obama did conduct an interview with Fox News's Bill O'Reilly on the Super Bowl pre-game show last month, and there have been moments of cooperation, but early on in the administration the die was cast when former Communications Anita Dunn called Fox News a wing of the Republican Party.
Now there's this, compliments of the liberal watch dog group Media Matters. They have obtained an audio tape where a Fox News executive – Washington managing editor Bill Sammon – boasts that he lied repeated during the closing days of the 2008 presidential campaign when he speculated on-air "about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism." The tape comes from a speech he gave in 2009 on board a Mediterranean cruise sponsored by a right-wing college. Listen:
Sammon gives his point of view of the story today to Howard Kurtz in the DailyBeast .
This article appears in Mar 24-30, 2011.