UK’s Telegraph: Obama is “Vulnerable” on Terrorism

from the Telegraph:

In his weekly radio address yesterday, President Barack Obama patted himself on the back for having “refocused the fight – bringing to a responsible end the war in Iraq, which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks”.

He then told people to remember that “our adversaries are those who would attack our country, not our fellow Americans”, before decrying “fear and cynicism” and “partisanship and division” – the code phrases for horrid Republicans used during his 2008 election campaign.

Complacency, faux moralising and partisan shots at Republicans. It was a neat summary of where Obama is going wrong after the Christmas Day debacle when the Nigerian knicker bomber managed to waltz onto a Detroit-bound flight.

For a man who campaigned denouncing the politicisation of national security under President George W Bush, it is worth noting how intensely political Obama’s treatment of what might henceforth be known as Underpantsgate has been.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/6924404/Barack-Obama-is-vulnerable-on-terror—and-he-knows-it.html

UK’s Telegraph: The White House will not Win the FOXNews Battle

     The missiles lobbed from the lawn of the White House by Communications Director Anita Dunn, and echoed by David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, at FOXNews, has not been lost on the international press. Nile Gardiner of the Telegraph writes:

As Anita Dunn, the Mao-quoting White House communications director put it in an interview with The New York Times:

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent. As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

As Dunn’s statement illustrates, this is an overtly political campaign – and one that is doomed to failure, as it will ensure that even more Americans end up tuning in to Fox shows. The United States is a nation built around the principles of free speech, limited government, and free enterprise, and it is highly unusual for a US administration to launch an authoritarian vendetta against an individual news station. It smacks of mean-spiritedness as well as desperation, and is an approach that is already backfiring, with Fox’s ratings receiving an added boost from the huge publicity.

Fox News is succeeding in America precisely because it is not afraid to challenge the status quo, and to take on the power of big government. It is unique in broadcast media in going against the grain of the dominant liberal networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, by providing an alternative perspective in a nation where conservatives are still the largest ideological group according to Gallup. Television news in America has for decades been dominated by a left-of-centre oligopoly that has not reflected public opinion. That smug arrangement was shattered when Fox opened for business in the mid-1990s.

For Mr. gardiner’s full article:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100014310/why-the-white-house-will-lose-its-war-against-fox-news/
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