Does Fox News Secretly Want Obama to Win?

By Jeremy W. Peters, The New York Times

19 July 12

onsider some recent barbs from the campaign trail. At a bar in Ohio where a television was tuned to Fox News, the president joked that one of the customers should ask to change the channel. “The customer is always right,” Mr. Obama cracked.

Last week he used the network as a punch line in his stump speech, saying that “Uncle Jim” — a fictional amalgam of his conservative critics — was “a little stubborn and been watching Fox News.”

Then there was an interview with Valerie Jarrett, one of Mr. Obama’s senior advisers. Ms. Jarrett was asked why some voters had the impression that the president was attacking the rich. “Well, they may be watching one particular network,” she sniffed. “CNN?” the interviewer teased.

None of this has gone unnoticed inside the studios and executive suites of Fox News, which is rebuffing these White House put-downs as a denigration of the presidency.

“I think it lowers the office,” Michael Clemente, Fox’s executive vice president of news, said in an interview on Wednesday. “For it to come up as regularly as it does — and it’s not every day but every other week, I’d say — it’s just unusual. Especially given the issues out there, like the lack of new jobs and Syria.”

Of all the items on the president’s plate, Mr. Clemente added, “I would like to be 15th on the list, not 3rd.”

Fox News and the Obama White House have never enjoyed a warm relationship. But after a caustic feud erupted in late 2009, the two seemed to agree to coexist peacefully. Glenn Beck, the incendiary host who called the president a racist, left after a falling-out with executives. The Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes, professed to be steering the network toward a “course correction,” an acknowledgment that it had shifted too hard to the right.

But now, with the presidential campaign entering its most competitive phase, the simmering tensions between Mr. Obama and the country’s highest-rated news channel threaten their fragile détente.

The White House and the Obama campaign in Chicago both view Fox News with a degree of skepticism. “We work with Fox News and their reporters in a professional way every day,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary. “But we’re not naïve about their business model.”

Turn on Fox News and much of the coverage is focused on stories that are unflattering to the White House. Far more than any other network, it chronicles daily developments in the scandal over Operation Fast and Furious, which involves a botched federal gun-tracking operation that has become a cause célèbre among conservatives. A Congressional investigation into the matter — another news event that has received careful attention on Fox — resulted in a contempt vote in the House of Representatives against Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. Fox News was the only cable news network early on to carry proceedings from the contempt hearings live.

The details of the bankruptcy of Solyndra, an alternative energy company that received $528 million in federal loan guarantees after heavily lobbying the White House, are well known to regular Fox viewers. So far this week, the story dominating Fox newscasts has been the conservative furor over a recent remark by the president that business owners owed much of their success to government investment.

Fox News tends to benefit when it covers Mr. Obama and the Democrats aggressively. Indeed, during the height of the 2009 spat between Fox News and the White House, the channel’s ratings grew 8 percent over all. And while many of its commentators and on-air guests may be rooting for a Mitt Romney victory, privately Fox executives say that a second Obama term could be the best thing that ever happened to their network.

Conversely, Mr. Obama has enjoyed hitting the Fox News punching bag now and again. During his 2008 campaign, just mentioning the network in a stump speech would rile up the crowd. A typical dig at Fox News would go something like this:

Mr. Obama would remark how engaged voters seemed to be. They were watching the debates, CNN and C-Span, he said. Then he would pause dramatically. “And Fox News,” he added, to a chorus of sonorous boos.

Political experts said Mr. Obama’s swipes at Fox News then and now seem to be in keeping with a strategy to discredit his opponents, a tactic the campaign has deployed rather effectively.

“Whoever it is who may be a source of strength for Romney, they’re out there trying to discredit them in some fashion,” said David Gergen, an adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. “It’s an old tactic, and it often works.”

The White House insists that the president does not have a preoccupation with Fox News, and that both of the president’s recent Fox quips were ad-libbed. The remark in Ohio came in an unrehearsed exchange with a potential voter. And the “Uncle Jim” comment, while uttered during a campaign speech, was not part of the written text.

“You would be surprised how low on the list of priorities this is,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director.

Mr. Clemente says he assumes that Mr. Obama feels frustrated with how he is covered, and from time to time likes to vent. The intensity of their dispute, he added, is far lower than it was in 2009.

“We’re examining and analyzing,” Mr. Clemente said. “And I think that can be annoying at times.”

After all, he noted dryly, “we’re not C-Span.”