This is both pitiful and long overdue. First the pitiful:

There was never a single moment when White House staff decided the major media outlets were falling down on the job. There were instead several such moments. For press secretary Robert Gibbs, the realization came in early September, when the New York Times ran a front-page story about the bubbling parental outrage over President Obama's plan to address schoolchildren ... For deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer, the more hyperbolic attacks on health-care reform this summer, which were often covered as a "controversy," flipped an internal switch. [...] And for his boss, Anita Dunn, the aha moment came when the Washington Post ran a second op-ed from a Republican politician decrying the "32" alleged czars appointed by the Obama Administration.

Seriously? It took them that long to figure this out? The coverage of Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, charges of socialism, birtherism, and whatever other ism any random nutbag came up with didn't clue them in -- never mind the run-up to the war in Iraq and pretty much the entire eight years of the Bush presidency?

But hey, credit where credit is due, because they're finally fighting back:

All the criticism, both fair and misleading, took a toll, regularly knocking the White House off message. So a new White House strategy has emerged: rather than just giving reporters ammunition to "fact-check" Obama's many critics, the White House decided it would become a player, issuing biting attacks on those pundits, politicians and outlets that make what the White House believes to be misleading or simply false claims, like the assertion that health-care reform would establish new "sex clinics" in schools. Obama, fresh from his vacation on Martha's Vineyard, cheered on the effort, telling his aides he wanted to "call 'em out." [...] White House officials offer no apologies. "The best analogy is probably baseball," says Gibbs. "The only way to get somebody to stop crowding the plate is to throw a fastball at them. They move."

And while it's unlikely that Fox News will ever stop crowding the plate, it's nice to see them getting brushed back with a line like this:

It's opinion journalism masquerading as news.

An amusing side note; Fox News' defense to the charge is, hey, we're not all Glenn Beck.

Anyway, let's file this one under, it's about damn time.