When Abraham Lincoln was confronted with unflattering press editorials during the Civil War that described him as "a blockhead," "a moron" and a "widow maker," he shrugged it off with a joke.
"Having an hour to spare on Sunday I read this batch of editorials and when I was through reading I asked myself, 'Abraham Lincoln, are you a man or a dog?' " he was quoted as saying.
Perhaps if President Barack Obama had shown the same sense of humor about Fox News, his critics would be calling him Lincolnesque today -- instead of Nixonian.
Shortly after the White House declared "war" on Fox's news division last month, calling it an arm of the Republican Party and attempting to freeze it out of a pooled press briefing, pundits on both the left and the right cried foul, summoning up comparisons to Richard Nixon's paranoid, vindictive presidency.
For its part, Fox -- whose already sky-high ratings have increased 9 percent in the month since the "war" started -- has stuck to its oft-repeated claim that its news and opinion divisions are separate.
How do the White House's actions -- they're refusing to do any interviews with Fox News until 2010 -- compare with efforts by past presidents to control their press coverage?
While Lincoln may have kept his cool, many presidents have been thin-skinned about the press -- Thomas Jefferson described newspapers as "the caricatures of disaffected minds," and Ulysses S. Grant said he'd "been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history."
Rick Perlstein, author of "Nixonland," an acclaimed history of the Nixon era published in 2008, took particular umbrage with the notion that Obama's action rivaled that of Nixon's White House.
"I thought it was a joke," Perlstein said in a recent telephone interview. "There's no way they can make that stick. That comment really doesn't speak well of the historical literacy of the political press corps."
Besides Nixon's famous "enemies list," Perlstein said, he retaliated against media outlets by challenging their broadcast licenses; used the IRS to audit his political enemies; encouraged a cartel of rich Texans to purchase CBS and ordered that all PBS funding be cut when he found out that NBC reporter Sander Vanocur was going to be hosting a program on the network.
Nixon is famous for his antipathy to the press, but what about Franklin D. Roosevelt? Slate.com's Jack Shafer noted that Roosevelt was skilled at charming individual members of the press -- and used the broadcast media to great effect to build public support -- but he detested what he called "interpretive" reporting.
FDR tangled frequently with the press barons of the day, notably Frank Gannett, founder of the media chain of the same name, who considered FDR a dictator and even publicly debated FDR's close adviser and secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, before an audience of 2,000, broadcast on NBC radio. The subject? "Do We Have a Free Press?" Ickes said no, claiming newspapers were beholden to advertisers, while Gannett predicted censorship and prosecution of papers under FDR.
Not all historians agree with that assessment. Terry Golway, author of a just-published book, "Together We Cannot Fail," a portrait of what he calls "the first media presidency," detailed through each fireside chat, asserts that many in the White House press corps loved Roosevelt, even if their bosses didn't.
"All you have to do is read the transcripts of those news conferences. He is quite charming, and the exchanges between him and the reporters show a remarkable degree of humor."
While some have raised the specter of Nixon or other presidents, conservative blogger Donald Sensing evoked another historical figure -- Saul Alinsky, founder of the modern community organizing movement, and a major influence on the young Barack Obama in his Chicago days -- in a recent post that was linked by The Wall Street Journal.
"It's right out of 'Rules for Radicals,' " contends Sensing, referring to a book by Alinsky, who died in 1972. "You pick the target, you freeze it, personalize it and polarize it, and that's what the White House is trying to do to Fox here."
People shouldn't make the mistake, he argues, that Fox News is the actual target. "They're going after all the media, but the White House wants the rest of the media to think its fight is with Fox News exclusively. It's not working. Not even CNN rolled over for this," he said, noting that Campbell Brown indignantly asked White House adviser Valerie Jarrett why they weren't going after MSNBC -- CNN's rival -- as well, only to have Jarrett laugh off the question.
"The not-so-subtle message to the rest of the media is," Sensing added, "'Here are the rules, play by them or else.' "
And what do Americans think?
A survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found Americans equally divided on the question of whether it is a "good thing" or a "bad thing" for cable-news hosts to have strong opinions.
Alex Jones, director at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School, predicted that another lesson from recent presidential-campaign history will continue to guide the Obama administration in its dealings with Fox -- and by extension, any negative media coverage.
"It's right out of the 'swiftboating' playbook," he said, referring to right-wing attacks on 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's Vietnam War record. "You don't ignore it, you counterpunch, and the Obama administration is saying, 'This is not going to stand.' "
(Mackenzie Carpenter can be reached at mcarpenter(at)post-gazette.com. For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.)
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