On Wednesday, tensions between the White House and its media critics, real or imagined, threatened to rise even higher. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer took a slap at "Politically Incorrect" host Bill Maher, who called U.S. military strikes on faraway targets "cowardly." Fleischer blasted Maher, claiming it was "a terrible thing to say," and didn't stop there, noting "There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is."
On the face of it, these moves by the Bush administration to discourage media criticism don't seem to make much sense. By the time of the Clinton interview, for instance, polls were showing unprecedented public support for Bush, which has since only increased. And at the time, all Clinton had to say about Bush was that he supported him, and urged the rest of the country to do the same.
But this White House has developed a particularly tense, mutually distrustful relationship with members of the news media, one that has only seemed to deepen since the Sept. 11 attacks. This relationship seems to be focused specifically on the White House's political and communication staffs (it's virtually impossible to imagine Bush knowing anything about the calls to NBC). And it embodies what many members of the media -- conservative, liberal and nonpartisan -- decry as an arrogant, unnecessarily adversarial attitude, one where questions about White House decisions are regarded as inappropriate and, now, quite possibly unpatriotic.
And the relationship has been particularly hampered by these White House staffers' well-publicized difficulty telling the truth.
