Obama Fox News Showdown A Murdoch 'Set Up': Wolff

Jason Linkins
HuffPost

Back in September, then Presidential hopeful Barack Obama had a "secret meeting" with Fox News executives in an effort to hash out "concern[s] about the way Fox was covering him." At the time, Obama wondered if Fox was ever going to give him "a fair shake," leading Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes to complain about Obama's imposed "boycott." In the end, the talk "eased tensions" and paved the way for Obama to make an appearance on The O'Reilly Factor. The whole thing was sort of treated as a win for all sides, with Rupert Murdoch continuing his practice of working to ally himself with brands he judges to be winners.

Over the weekend, however, Michael Wolff, whose book, The Man Who Owns The News is already garnering blockbuster attention for its fly-on-the-wall take on Murdoch's empire, threw a new wrinkle at the historical record of this meeting. He told a skeptical Howard Kurtz that the whole sit-down was staged as a way of getting Obama to level criticisms at Ailes that Murdoch himself didn't dare mention:

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