Two days after the president won the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama's communications director was on national television essentially declaring a message war on a major cable network that employs the abrasive commentator Beck, who recently called the president a racist.

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn accused Fox News of operating "as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party."

It's hard to understand this as a calculated move for a White House that has far bigger things to worry about — Iranian President Ahmadinejad's nuclear ambitions being just one — than drive-by rants on cable television. But it's part of a new strategy of more aggressively confronting...