Wednesday, March 14, 2007 | 7:17 a.m.
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When the first President Bush went on a televised tirade against Dan Rather during the 1988 campaign, he was applauded for standing up to the elite liberal media. The incident was contrived, the orchestrated genius of his media guru, Roger Ailes, who was holding up the cue cards, according to Craig Crawford's book, "Attack the Messenger."
It was part of a Republican strategy that went back decades of running against the media and defining them as liberal and elitist.
Conservatives, of course, would eventually find their own media outlet, with the same Roger Ailes at its center as head of Fox News.
Now, however, tables are turning. Liberals are attacking Fox and for that matter, mainstream media. Tapping into unhappiness over the war and what they see as Fox's deliberate misrepresentations, those activists are also pressing Democrats to make the cable outlet a campaign issue.
This new sensibility was on display last week when the Nevada Democratic Party canceled a Reno presidential debate to be broadcast on Fox, after weeks of daily haranguing and calls by liberal activists.
The new strategy is being carried out largely on the Internet, at heavily read Web sites such as Daily Kos, as well as liberal advocacy groups such as MoveOn.org and Media Matters for America, a Web-based liberal press monitor that has documented Fox's "misinformation" history.
The new aggressiveness is also happening on Fox News itself as Democrats follow the lead of former President Bill Clinton, who became combative with a Fox interviewer in a widely watched segment last year.
By going after Fox, Democrats are using tactics that were once the provenance of conservatives, whose strategists have been known to refer to attacks on the media as "working the refs."
The strategy is not without risk or a downside, however.
Many Democrats see the cancellation of the event as a missed opportunity to reach Fox viewers, who outnumber the cable channel's rivals. Not all of its viewers are the kind of partisan Republicans liberal bloggers believe them to be.
As Dan Gerstein, a paid adviser to Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, wrote Tuesday on the Web site of The Politico: "Fox provides a powerful platform to influence the views of hundreds of thousands of valuable voters. It just seems self-defeating to pass up an opportunity to reach those viewers, just because the network features some inflammatory talk show hosts who say things of which I don't approve."
Political scientist Larry Sabato agreed, calling the cancellation of the debate foolish, and Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, one of the Democratic candidates, also said the decision to cancel was a mistake.
"Take it to their house," Bill Maher told CNN's Larry King Monday. "Win an away game."
For online liberals, however, no amount of free air time on Fox was worth what they viewed as legitimizing the network.
Despite the sharp rhetoric mounted against Fox and the Nevada debate, it's clear the online liberals made a calculated decision: The attacks on Fox, which generated coverage by the mainstream media, were worth losing the 90 minutes of Democratic candidates' exposure to Fox viewers.
Eric Alterman, a liberal media critic and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said the trade-off provided a chance to cast the cable news network as a "propaganda outfit for conservatives and the Republican Party."
Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and a consultant to Fox rival CNN, also applauded the move: "It shows Democrats are finally growing a spine. The right-wing attack on the free press has been so effective that the mainstream media (are) completely cowed, and now finally Democrats are turning it around."
Karl Frisch of Media Matters for America said the dissatisfaction is not just with Fox, however.
In a report released Monday, the group found that of the four Sunday morning talk shows, only one - ABC's "This Week" - has been "roughly balanced" between both Democrats and Republicans since the 2006 midterm elections. Conservatives control the nation's political conversation, the group said.
Online liberals say that a chief problem in the Democratic Party is an unwillingness to roll in the mud with Republicans and their surrogates in the media. Dumping Fox has a salutary symbolic effect, a way for Democrats to show voters they'll hit back, online liberals say.
"They've been pushing us around with this medium, on television, pretending it's objective, for over a decade now, and we just beat them, and this is push back," said Jerome Armstrong, a liberal blogger and co-author of a book on Internet politics with Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos. "We beat ya. We don't play by your rules anymore."
Indeed, one advantage they have is that like some of their rivals on the right, they are unafraid to blur the line between media and activism. Moulitsas was railing against Fox every day to his 500,000 readers, while also listening in on a conference call with Nevada Sen. Harry Reid telling him to cancel the debate, mixing his opinion journalism with his activism.
Unlike many news outlets that might have kept quiet, Fox isn't taking this lying down, which brings to mind another risk of dumping the debate. Fox has a microphone, and its executives and conservative hosts aren't afraid to use it.
Indeed, Fox Vice President David Rhodes accused the state party of being controlled by "radical fringe out-of-state interest groups." (A Fox spokeswoman declined to comment beyond the statement released last week.)
Then there was this exchange last week on "The Beltway Boys" between Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes:
KONDRACKE: Fox or no Fox, this tells you a lot about what the MoveOn.org, Daily Kos kind of left-wing liberals are all about. They are not about free speech and free debate. They just want to stop any Democrats from participating because it is a Fox thing, and they're willing to intimidate them to do it. This is junior grade Stalinism on their part.
BARNES: Stalin?
KONDRACKE: Stalin.
BARNES: All right, I agree.
By comparing liberals to Stalin, who massacred tens of millions of innocents, the Fox commentators proved the larger point, the bloggers say: Fox should play no role in the Democratic presidential race.
David Lublin, an American University political scientist, said the debate about the debate was about more than just Fox: It was another way to fire up the local grass roots.
"Bloggers are huge believers in listening to local people," Lublin said, "It's fairly unusual for local people to say, 'Do not hold a presidential debate in our arena,' " he said, referring to the Carson City Democratic Central Committee, which voted overwhelmingly to condemn the Fox debate.
Chris Wicker, chairman of the Washoe County Democratic Party, said that while Nevada county chairmen viewed the debate as an opportunity, local rank-and-file Democrats disagreed - vigorously. Wicker said he was inundated from the outset with e-mails critical of the partnership.
"People wanted to know why we would play ball with Fox and give them this varnish of legitimacy," he said. "And they weren't just the activists."
The opposition included longtime precinct captains and party volunteers who threatened to step down from their posts and withdraw their support for the county party, Wicker said.
If true, then online liberals have successfully gotten the message out to party regulars: Politics isn't just about beating Republicans - it's about beating their messengers, too.
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