Rewind to October 2009: Fox News Channel and the White House were at war. In one particularly heated incident, Fox claimed the Obama administration had tried to oust the "fair & balanced" network from an interview with Treasury official Kenneth Feinberg, when the other four news nets in the TV coverage pool had been offered access. In the end, Fox was included, and a Treasury Department spokesman snarled: "There was no plot to exclude Fox News, and they had the same interview that their competitors did. Much ado about absolutely nothing."
Emails that surfaced last week, however, through a public records request by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, suggest otherwise.
"We'd prefer if you skip Fox please," a White House broadcast media staffer advised a Treasury Department public affairs secretary ahead of the interview. In other emails during the same time frame, deputy White House communications director Jennifer Psaki called Fox News anchor Bret Baier "a lunatic" and boasted that "I am putting some dead fish in the fox cubby--just cause." In yet another email, another White House press officer wrote: "We've demonstrated our willingness and ability to exclude Fox News from significant interviews …"
Proof of an anti-Fox agenda in the Oval Office? Judicial Watch thinks so.
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