The recent effort by the White House to give Fox News less access than other major news organizations is wrong and foolish.

The most dramatic example came Oct. 22 when the Treasury Department tried to exclude Fox from a round of interviews with the executive-pay czar Kenneth R. Feinberg. Networks planned to share video from a "pool" camera. To their credit, Fox’s TV news competitors refused to go along with the effort to exclude the commentary and news network.

In September the White House had excluded "Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace" from a round of presidential interviews with Sunday morning news programs. While less egregious than trying to prohibit a reporter from pool coverage, it was still a bad choice by the administration.

In a recent interview with NBC News, President Obama hinted at what was behind the approach to Fox News.

"What our advisers have simply said is that we are going to take media as it comes. And if media is operating, basically, as a talk radio format, then that’s one thing. And if it’s operating as a news outlet, then that’s another," said the president.

In other words, if, in the opinion of the administration, a news network is performing as the administration thinks a news network should perform, they are welcomed to participate. But if they are — in the opinion of the administration — not acting as a news network should, they risk exclusion.

That is a very slippery and dangerous slope to head down. Taken to its logical extreme, it would result in the White House bending coverage to its favor by awarding news organizations that play nice and punishing those that don’t.

This strategy can only backfire. It feeds the argument of Fox ultra-conservative commentators Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity that this administration has some sinister plan to silence its critics. They relish the fight. It’s boosting their ratings.

The president and his supporters are free to point out when they think Fox News is bias in its reporting. Plenty of media critics agree with them. From my perspective, Fox News reporters are far more eager to find negative stories about the Obama administration than they ever were about the Bush White House.

But it is improper for the administration to try to force Fox News to comply with its version of how it should cover the news.