The White House vs. NBC News: Yet Another Reaction…

The Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin writes about the Gillespie letter and makes an interesting argument which I have edited for brevity…

It doesn’t take a trained psychologist to observe that Bush got angrier and angrier as the Engel interview went on. That obviously had nothing to do with the editing; it had to do with Engel’s questions.

Bush typically sits down with interviewers from Fox News — or, more recently, Politico– where he can count on more than his share of ingratiating softballs. But Engel, a fluent Arabic speaker who has logged more time in Iraq than any other television correspondent, assertively confronted Bush with the ramifications of his actions in the Middle East.

(snip)

And Bush seemed positively furious by the end of the interview, when Engel had this to say: “The war on terrorism has been the centerpiece of your presidency. Many people say that it has not made the world safer, that it has created more radicals. That there are more people in this part of the world who want to attack the United States.”

So is it a stretch to suspect that Bush told his counselor to get a little revenge?

The other essential bit of context is the ferocious, high-profile campaign being orchestrated by Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes and News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch against NBC and its cable channel, MSNBC. Just in case that had escaped the White House’s attention before, a front-page Washington Post story by Howard Kurtz yesterday noted, among other things, that O’Reilly “routinely assails NBC . . . as an organization that ’spews out far-left propaganda,’ is ‘the most aggressive anti-Bush network’ and is ‘in the tank’ for Barack Obama.”

Gillespie was clearly unloading more than a little pent-up frustration with NBC. Though his letter opened by decrying what he called the “deceitful editing” of the Engel interview, he quickly added a litany of other complaints: