Snubbed: Why Obama is right to avoid/ignore Fox News

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Can you blame President Obama for "snubbing" Fox News yesterday?

Steve Benen: "Fox News spent months promoting last weekend's right-wing protests in Washington, encouraging viewers to go register their outrage. And during the event itself, the Republican news network went a step further, encouraging the crowd to get louder once the cameras were on." (HuffPo has more.)

This is a network that wants Obama to fail, that wants health-care reform to fail, and that is actively involved with the right-wing mobs that are terrorizing the political culture -- that, in fact, is helping to organize those mobs, using its megaphone to spew conservative venom, making it seem as if those mobs are the all-American mainstream (in fact, they are but an extremist fringe).

At this point, what is the point of reaching out to Republicans? Obama has done enough of that already -- and all it has gotten him is opposition and obstructionism, which he would have gotten anyway.

No, what Obama needs to do is to talk directly to the American people, not through the distorting partisan prism of Fox News, as well as to Democrats, in an effort to bring them together, at long last, to pass meaningful reform. He is doing that, and he is doing well, and so what if Fox News, ever unfair, ever unbalanced, gets ignored in the process?