Fox News is not only a real news network, it is the only news network that is singularly necessary in today's media environment. If you don't believe me, ask the New York Times.

I often rake the Gray Lady over the coals and for good reason. The Times has been guilty of a lot of embarrassingly partisan and irresponsible journalism. But it is not without redeeming qualities, one of which is that is it quite capable of being embarrassed.

Consider Public Editor Clark Hoyt's mea culpa for the Times' tardiness in picking up the ACORN story. The whole thing is worth reading, but this is the best paragraph, out of several describing letters to the Paper of Record:

Here's an example, from Leigh Allen of San Francisco, who said she relies on The Times to keep her informed: "I often don't hear about the latest conflict until I read a Facebook rant from an old high school friend or talk on the phone with my mother (both in conservative Orange County, Calif.). It's embarrassing not to be able to respond with facts when I hadn't even heard about the issue." Michele Cusack of Novato, Calif., said that when someone asked if she had heard the latest about Acorn, "I had to answer 'no' because I get all my news from The New York Times."

It seems to me that that last sentence is damning for the country's most famous paper: I didn't know what was going on because I read the New York Times. In fact, you wouldn't have known if you relied on the rest of the mainstream media. But you knew if you watched Fox or keep in contact with an old high school friend who watches Fox.

It is this fact that motivated the Obama Administration's decision to go to war against Fox. Jim Rutenberg at the NYTs has this:

Late last month, the senior White House adviser David Axelrod and Roger Ailes, chairman and chief executive of Fox News, met in an empty Palm steakhouse before it opened for the day, neutral ground secured for a secret tête-à-tête.

An attempted rapprochement! However:

By the following weekend, officials at the White House had decided that if anything, it was time to take the relationship to an even more confrontational level. The spur: Executives at other news organizations, including The New York Times, had publicly said that their newsrooms had not been fast enough in following stories that Fox News, to the administration's chagrin, had been heavily covering through the summer and early.

The rest of the news networks were realizing that Fox was consistently scooping them. In other words, it wasn't Fox and its stories, exactly, that the Administration was worried about. It was that the other networks might be forced to drop the protection that they had so far provided to Obama and Company. They might start covering stories as soon as they appeared on Fox or, horrors, actually start doing such stories on their own. That is why the Administration went to war against Fox News.

Speaking privately at the White House on Monday with a group of mostly liberal columnists and commentators, including Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert of The New York Times, Mr. Obama himself gave vent to sentiments about the network, according to people briefed on the conversation.

That is the sort of room in which Barack Obama is comfortable: one in which everyone loves him and vows to protect him. Except, I'd keep an eye on Maureen Dowd. She's unpredictable.

It is also clear from the Rutenberg article that Fox's account of the Feinberg incident was fair and balanced.

In a sign of discomfort with the White House stance, Fox's television news competitors refused to go along with a Treasury Department effort on Tuesday to exclude Fox from a round of interviews with the executive-pay czar Kenneth R. Feinberg that was to be conducted with a "pool" camera crew shared by all the networks. That followed a pointed question at a White House briefing this week by Jake Tapper, an ABC News correspondent, about the administration's treatment of "one of our sister organizations."

The Administration tried to exclude Fox from the circle of "real" news networks, and the other networks, acting responsibly, defended their "sister organization."

Barack Obama set out to marginalize and neuter a network that did not report the news to his liking. Though we can now understand the strategy, it still looks stupid. The actual result was to confirm Fox's status as a legitimate news organization and, I suspect, to make it more visible and influential that ever before. Fox is not only real it is indispensible, at least if you care about a free press.