For a Nobel Prize winner, President Obama sure is fighting a lot of battles.Most of them aren’t his fault. Obama inherited the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his domestic battles over health care and the economy are hardly unexpected — although the viciousness of the fighting on all those fronts is shocking.But it seems the president’s communications team isn’t content to just be fighting on these fronts. Instead, they’ve declared battle with another enemy — Fox News.Senior officials have begun to vocally shun the unabashedly conservative news network, criticizing its lack of objectivity and pointing out perceived biases.  Anita Dunn, White House communications director, called the network “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff, encouraged other networks not to be “led by Fox.” And senior adviser David Axelrod maintains it isn’t a news organization at all.To be fair, it’s certainly not the White House that fired the first shot.In fact, it’s hardly possible to pick out a first shot.Fox News has always reflected negatively on Obama. It isn’t, as some of Obama’s more devoted supporters may accuse, because he’s black. It’s because he’s a liberal — which, to Fox News’ pundits and their rabidly right-wing fan base, puts him up there on the “List of Bad People” immediately below Communists and just above murderers.These officials’ complaints are not without some validity. It’s true Fox News focuses heavily on opinion personalities such as Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. These personalities boast the prime-time slots on the network, and an overwhelming majority of its viewership is attracted to opinion instead of reporting.And it’s true Fox News’ coverage skews (heavily) to the right, and it skews fairly often. The network devoted time to incendiary non-issues about Obama’s citizenship and religious views. Its coverage of the president is almost universally negative. It tends to focus on divisions and conflicts far more than agreements and solutions.In other words, there’s a huge list of problems with the network.But Fox News is hardly more irresponsible than its competitors. MSNBC skews left just as badly as Fox  News skews right, and it has it’s own divisive, personality-focused punditry. And CNN seems to have more user-generated content than it does useful reporting.The White House’s problem with Fox  News is that it just so happens to skew right — and that means it’s going to cast the Democratic leadership, especially the presidency, in a negative light.But, in taking pot-shots at Fox News, staffers are not just showing biases themselves, but also making a stupid mistake.Call it the Rush Limbaugh effect: the stronger the White House comes out against them, the more ammo the network has with which to demonize them — and not all that ammo is unsubstantiated.The smart strategy would be to treat them nicely. The White House staff should have pre-written e-mails and paper with the official letterhead in a holster, and those communiques would say this:”Thank you for your contribution to the civil discourse. Although we disagree with your network’s assessment of our policies, we appreciate hearing your constructive criticism, and we look forward to a continued open discussion of what is best for the country.”The more rabidly dogmatic Fox News gets, the more polite the White House should be. The more times Glenn Beck calls Obama a socialist, the more gift baskets he should get. They should be civil with Fox News, and they should be civil in the loudest, most public ways they can.Why? Because the only people who believe those personalities are legitimate are the ones who are going to vote Republican regardless of policies or candidates. Because moderate America, the great silent demographic that decides elections, would rather hear some civility for a change, instead of watching the highest officials in our country lower themselves to the level of ranting, raving, bitter and useless pundits.Who knows? It might even shut Glenn Beck up. And that would be a far greater accomplishment than health care reform.Matthew Albright is a 21-year-old mass communication sophomore from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_malbright.– – – – Contact Matthew Albright at [email protected]