The American Spectator

AmSpecBlog

Leaving Out the Big Fragment

By Paul Chesser on 9.21.09 @ 10:15AM

Howard Kurtz this morning surveys the broadcast news networks about "Saturation Sunday," also known as President Obama's media blitz on the television news talk shows yesterday. As most information junkies know by now, the president visited every major program (plus Univision's "Al Punto") except for "Fox News Sunday." Here's the administration's reasoning:

"It's simple," explains White House communications director Anita Dunn. "In an increasingly fragmented audience that gets information from a number of different sources, putting a huge amount of his time behind one medium increases our ability to really break through and get a message out. The effect of one interview, given how rapidly the news environment moves, doesn't last as long as it used to."

Pretty huge fragment he's leaving out there -- sometimes three million viewers. Even if it's not the audience that are the president's natural allies, he's perpetuating the perception that he sees them as fringe racists with a mob mentality, who are unworthy of any explanation of his policies.

But "FNS" host Chris Wallace boils the administration down to this: "They are the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington."

topics:
Barack Obama, Mainstream Media, The Obama Administration