Jarrett charges Fox is biased, backs off on mention of MSNBC

A White House aide on Tuesday quickly backtracked on her charge that Fox News was biased after a reporter asked her whether she believed MSNBC was similarly skewed.

"Of course they're biased," Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett said about Fox's coverage, adding that the administration was going to "call them on the carpet" for "all of the distortions." But when CNN's Campbell Brown pressed Jarrett to say if MSNBC's reportage also possessed a political slant, Jarrett revised her original reply: "Actually, I don't want to just generalize all FOX is biased or that another station is biased."

"I think what we want to do is look at it on a case-by-case basis," Jarrett explained about the White House's media strategy. "And when we see a pattern of distortion, we're going to be honest about that pattern of distortion."

Jarrett's remark on Tuesday is merely the Obama administration's latest salvo in an ongoing battle against the Fox network, which White House officials have recently decried as too opinionated to qualify as news. Fox reporters, however, have increasingly fired back at that strategy, and a number of Republicans have similarly accused the White House of trying to stamp out dissent.

But Jarrett dismissed that premise during her interview. She explained the administration was instead committed to correcting the many inaccuracies pervading national debates over such landmark issues as healthcare reform -- an effort, she added, that is not exclusively targeted at Fox.

"I think that what the administration has said very clearly is that we're going to speak truth to power," Jarrett said. "When we saw all of the distortions in the course of the summer, when people were coming down to town hall meetings and putting up signs that were scaring seniors to death, when we have seen commercials go up on television that are distorting the truth, we're actually calling everybody out."