WASHINGTON — Late last month, senior White House adviser David Axelrod and Roger Ailes, chairman and chief executive of Fox News, met in an empty Midtown Manhattan steakhouse before it opened for the day, neutral ground secured for a secret tête-à-tête.
Ailes, who had reached out to Axelrod to address rising tensions between the network and the White House, told him that Fox's reporters were fair, if tough, and should be considered separate from the Fox commentators' skewering the president nightly, according to people briefed on the meeting. Axelrod said it was the view of the White House that Fox News had blurred the line between news and anti-Obama advocacy.
What both men took to be the start of a frank but productive dialogue proved, in retrospect, more akin to the round of pre-Pearl Harbor peace talks between the United States and Japan.
By the following weekend, officials at the White House had decided that if anything, it was time to take the relationship to an even more confrontational level. There followed, beginning in earnest more than two weeks ago, an intensified volley of White House comments describing Fox as "not a news network."
The subsequent heated back-and-forth between the White House and Fox News has brought delight to Fox's conservative commentators.
Speaking privately at the White House on Monday with a group of columnists and commentators, including Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert of The New York Times, President Barack Obama himself gave vent to sentiments about the network, according to people briefed on the conversation.
Then, in an interview with NBC News on Wednesday, Obama went public. "What our advisers have simply said is that we are going to take media as it comes," he said. "And if media is operating, basically, as a talk radio format, then that's one thing. And if it's operating as a news outlet, then that's another."
White House officials continue to interact with Fox News correspondents whom they have complimented as professional, including Major Garrett and Wendell Goler.
But Michael Clemente, senior vice president for news and editorial programming at Fox, said the White House was conflating commentary with news coverage.
"I think we're doing the job we're supposed to be doing," he said, "and we do it as well as anyone."
