This is a rush transcript from "Special Report," July 14, 2011. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAY CARNEY, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: It is well known that at the time there was a dispute between Fox News and its coverage and the White House and its feelings about the coverage. I mean that was then. And, you know, we obviously deal with Fox News regularly. I call on you regularly. We give interview to Fox News, including to Bill O'Reilly. And so beyond that, I don't really know much about it.
TOM FITTON, JUDICIAL WATCH PRESIDENT: These e-mails show a widespread hostility to Fox News, as evidenced by the suggestion that one White House press official wanted to put a dead fish in the cubby of the Fox News operation there at the White House and another e-mail calling Bret Baier a lunatic. You can call Bret Baier a lot of things. I don't think he's too far -- so far out as to be a lunatic.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BREAM: He is not here, so we will vouch for him. He is definitely not.
All right, you're hearing there from White House Press Secretary Jay Carney responding to this new report from Judicial Watch saying they made a FOIA request. They requested to see e-mails and things involved at the White House. And you heard the response there that they say things have gotten better.
Alright before the break we asked you, has the Obama administration treated Fox News Channel unfairly? 90 percent of you said yes, 10 percent said no.
Chuck, I want to start with you. This is a White House. They made a decision regarding access to interviewing a senior treasury official. It's their decision. Ethically, though, how should they go about deciding who is in and who is out?
CHARLES LANE, WASHINGTON POST: Well, this goes back to '09, the first year the administration, David Axelrod attempting to get the rest of the, quote/unquote, "mainstream media" to kind of ostracize Fox News. That really failed very badly. And they have since back pedaled off of that. So I think Jay Carney is right, this is in a way old news.
A couple of e-mails. Frankly I'd like to see the internal e-mails here at Fox about the Obama administration. Maybe a few things would turn up that wouldn't look so great.
And you know, they are very -- any kind of press coverage that they don't like really gets under their skin. I can tell you that from my experience at The Post. This to me is not that big a deal. As Tom Fitton seems to describe it, somebody calls Bret a lunatic, which of course not true, in an e-mail. And so I pronounce it a [INAUDIBLE].
BREAM: And I think for a lot of people the problem is that the White House denied trying to ice Fox out of that initial interview and these e-mails seem to show something different, Steve.
STEVE HAYES, SENIOR WRITER, THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Yeah I know, this is -- it's not actually complicated. They were caught in a lie. And the White House was lying about this stuff. And there is no reason to dress it up. That is what happened. They said that this didn't happen and it happened. So it's a lie. I'm not terribly concerned that somebody sent a joking e-mail about putting a dead fish in the cubby. That stuff happens all the time. I don't think we should make a federal case about that stuff. But on the merits of the issue the White House put out one line and the opposite was the truth. I think that is what we learn from the story.
BREAM: Charles, you seen antsy over here.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, just in response to what Chuck has said. I can assure you that among all the internal e-mail I've gotten in Fox I never seen a dead fish. I'm looking, but I don't see it.
(CROSSTALK)
KRAUTHAMMER: As for lunacy and Bret, I can speak as a psychiatrist, the only one on the panel. I can definitively say that he is not -- I'm not ruling out everything but a lunatic he is not.
BREAM: He's not.
KRAUTHAMMER: But actually you have a flipside here, which is for somebody high up in the White House press office to actually write, or to think or to write of Bret Baier, who I think is the most level-headed sort of together to use an old adjective, man I've ever met, as a lunatic, tells you a bit about the psychology of the people in the White House and how -- well I won't use the word deranged -- but how upset they might be about Fox News.
And the reason is that liberals, particularly liberals in government, are very upset at that Fox came along and broke the liberal monopoly on the news. It not only shattered the monopoly, it so well that it has to be accepted and that is what the administration attempted to do early on is to ostracize it. But given the size of its audience, the popularity and, I would add, as a partisan here that is excellence particularly on this show, on news, it can't. And the other news media admitted that.
But I think it does show how much Fox gets under their skin that a new administration would go to these lengths to have a strategy against the network.
BREAM: Well in the wake of that, I want to point to the response that we had from our senior news vice president -- vice president of news, excuse me Michael Clemente. And this is something that Jim Angle mentioned, quote, "On and off-the-air, relations with this administration have come a long way since then, and if that unfortunate incident helped to get things on a better track, then it served its purpose." So Chuck, do you think we can say, you know, there is a silver lining?
LANE: I think we have just found a statesman to help facilitate the debt limit.
(CROSSTALK)
BREAM: The debt negotiations. Michael Clemente.
LANE: It shows you can rise above and reach out to the other side and make peace.
HAYES: And to demonstrate just how far it's gone. If you listened carefully to the president's news conference the other day when he was describing the optimal balance the optical solution to the debt crisis, he said he wanted to be fair and balanced.
BREAM: I did notice that he said that. Charles, were you keeping track?
KRAUTHAMMER: Yeah, that was a triumph of Fox News. Liberals are using our language. We should keep it up and see if he ends up supporting the Republicans in the House on the budget.
BREAM: Well, it's also important to remember, you know we had a couple of our colleagues who were hurt or attacked in Egypt, were hospitalized were also held at one point. And, you know, the White House was very instrumental, Robert Gibbs at the time over there, in trying to help Fox and get them out of there. Thank god they were safe and sound after that. So certainly, ya know it looks like we've mended some fences.
KRAUTHAMMER: In the end, we are all Americans. Let's put that way.
BREAM: Yes, we absolutely are.
KRAUTHAMMER: Honorable, patriotic Americans.
BREAM: So where do we go from here? Do you think Jay Carney having to answer it today got under his skin a little bit? Do you think it's something today, he wants to see finished?
LANE: It didn't look to me like he was terribly annoyed about it. It did look like - I mean he's intimately familiar with what went on back then that he is kind of looking forward to a different era. This was the result of, I think there was a different era in '09 at the White House. Robert Gibbs, let's face it was a little bit more of a conflictual press secretary than Jay is, at least publicly. And I think, ya know his response to it was very classy and sort of forward looking and, you know, set the standard that way.
KRAUTHAMMER: And Jay, himself, is a journalist. Would have seen --
(CROSSTALK)
KRAUTHAMMER: -- what a bad idea ostracism is.
BREAM: And by the way, we are getting word, that president is going to talk to reporters on this whole debt ceiling negotiation thing. He is going to take questions. He said a couple weeks back he would be holding a lot of these availabilities, whether we want to call it a news conference.
HAYES: Good, can we do another panel on it then?
BREAM: We might do another panel on that.
Gentlemen, thank you very much. That's it for panel. But stay tuned. Big developments today in the Roger Clemens perjury trial. See what happens when a so-called expert is called to weigh in.
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