GO AHEAD, MAKE MY SUNDAY

摘要

A funny thing happened last September when the White House was attempting to both drumrnup support for health-care reform and fire arnbroadside at Fox News. President Obama satrnfor back-to-back interviews with each of televi-sion's Sunday-morning news show hosts: ABC'srnGeorge Stephanopoulos, CBS' Bob Schieffer,rnCNN's John King, NBC's David Gregory and Univision's Jorge Ramos. Everyone, that is, ex-cept Chris Wallace, host of Fox News Sunday. It was no accident, given the Obama administration's claim of unfair, politically motivated coverage from Fox. If the White House could relegate Wallace, a veteran Washington reporter who worked for 14 years at ABC News before joining Fox, to the media equivalent of Siberia, they could de-legitimize the entire network. But the gesture ended up putting the president into a surprising quagmire: The other news organizations lined up with Fox, widely panning the strategy and coming to the network's defense.rn"Anytime anybody in the political world uses guest bookings as either a gift or in a punitive way, you start playing games with the news," observes Steve Capus, president of NBC News. "If you're an administration official, you ought to be able to answer questions from someone like Chris Wallace."