Standing at his command post, Ulysses Grant could look across the valley and see Braxton Bragg’s couriers come and go from the Rebel’s headquarters on top of Missionary Ridge. Having arrived in Chattanooga a few weeks earlier, Grant immediately went about consolidating his command (the armies of the Cumberland, the Tennessee, and the Mississippi, all named for rivers) in the hopes of retaining the city and lifting the virtual siege. Bragg, commanding elements of the armies of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Northern Virginia (all named for states) decided he could best seal the Yankees’ fate by recapturing Knoxville, dispatching Longstreet to do so. This gave Grant a problem. He doubted he could defeat the Confederates before him, positioned as they were on the encircling heights, nor could he re-enforce Burnside at Knoxville since Old Pete was in the way. Grant, therefore, chose to engage with the enemy before him in a battle of dubious outcome in order to draw pressure off of Burnside, secure his rear, and concentrate his forces on Bragg.
While President Obama has spoken about his admiration of Lincoln, he seems to be borrowing his tactics from Grant. He surely could not have expected to be successful in excluding Fox News from pool coverage of remarks by the government’s pay czar. One can only assume that, by attacking Fox directly, he hoped to relieve mounting pressure in other areas. Recent reports on meetings at ABC, the NY Times, and the Washington Post reflected anxiety at apparently loosing scoops to Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.
By forcing other news outlets to come to the defense of Fox, the administration also forces those news outlets to pressure Fox to clearly separate its reporting and its commentary. On the one hand, this is good. The journalistic community should be self-regulating. On the other hand, it is disturbing to see that this self-regulation is being brought about with an air of censorship.
It does not seem like an accident that these moves against Fox are happening at the same time that the health care debate is moving closer to a culmination. (And for the record, I’m all for a public option given that single payer is not going to happen.) The Administration’s attacks on Fox News are really attempts to control that conversation. It’s interesting that the only change that this represents from the previous administration is that now the White House is against rather than with Fox News. Since Fox appears to remain a lynch pin of Administration media strategy, that small difference doesn’t seem like much of a change at all.