Concerned citizens should consider the battle between the Obama administration and Fox News as discussed in White House Escalates War on Fox News

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN that President Obama does not want “the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox.”

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod went further by calling on media outlets to join the administration in declaring that Fox is “not a news organization.”

“Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way,” Axelrod counseled ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “We’re not going to treat them that way.”

The fourth estate is supposed to act as the final check and balance in our Republic. From mainstream media news to the independent blogger, information is supposed to spread to the individual on the street, who ultimately decides what they choose to believe or not. I guess this is where the saying “We Report, You Decide” comes from. Whether you are on the left, right, center, or none of the above, this should ring warning bells.

We won’t argue that that a similar rift existed between certain news establishments when a Republican administration was in office, because that is not the point. The point is, that while an administration has every right to refuse interviews on a particular network, it borders on un-American when the official mouthpieces for the President ask other news agencies sympathetic to their cause to take a single-sided approach to reporting the news and shun another organization simply because that organization refuses to report the news the way they would prefer.

Once the executive branch, congress and judiciary get involved in the day to day operations of the fourth branch, we face a serious danger to free speech and responsible journalism. If other mainstream news organizations follow the lead of the Obama administration, it is simply a matter of time before legislation to shut-out non-certified journalists becomes law. This is akin to what we might find in China in present day, where the average blogger faces a life behind bars for discussing facts and opinion.

Apparently, one of the main issues is that FOX News is fact checking their stories, which, from my understanding, is the job of responsible journalists.

The White House stopped providing guests to ‘Fox News Sunday’ after Wallace fact-checked controversial assertions made by Tammy Duckworth, assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, in August. Dunn said fact-checking an administration official was “something I’ve never seen a Sunday show do.”

“She criticized ‘FOX News Sunday’ last week for fact-checking — fact-checking — an administration official,” Wallace said Sunday. “They didn’t say that our fact-checking was wrong. They just said that we had dared to fact-check.”

Well, at least administration officials are all on the same page when it comes to fact checking, as is obvious from last week’s un-fact-checked mainstream attack on private citizen Rush Limbaugh .

In this day and age, even facts may be lies or half-truths, depending on their source and the agenda of the organization providing the report. We need organizations like FOX news, CNN, alternative internet media and individual bloggers to balance each other out. Let them report, and let the people decide.