Oscar Wilde once described fox hunting as "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the inedible."

What would he have said about Fox hunting? Perhaps "the ineffectual in full pursuit of the uncredible."

The Obama administration's campaign to marginalize Fox News seems to us a case of badly misplaced priorities.

With unemployment nearing 10 percent, with 10,000 Americans a day having been foreclosed upon in the second quarter, with two wars to fight, with the banking and insurance industries asserting their hegemony over Congress, with regulatory agencies more concerned with turf than protecting the American public, with a weak public option the best they can do on health care reform, is a Fox hunt really a good use of resources?

The feud has been good news for Fox; the cable news network's viewership is up 8 percent since Oct. 11, when White House Communications Director Anita Dunn told CNN that Fox News operates "almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party."

Top advisers Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod and press secretary Robert Gibbs then chimed in, and it became apparent that the White House was trying to "marginalize" Fox, suggesting that other news organizations shouldn't follow Fox's lead.

And since Washington journalists like nothing better than to talk about their own importance, the issue has been bubbling merrily along ever since. Newsweek editor Jon Meacham this week suggested it might even be a back-door ploy "to give otherwise dissatisfied Democrats something to cheer ... (making) the White House seem more progressive than it is."

More news than ever is available to Americans, but the percentage of those who avail themselves of it is smaller than ever. The market for news has been segmented, like the markets for many other products. General-interest media like newspapers, network news and news magazines now compete with niche media targeted to specific market segments.

Cable news networks are the largest of the niche media, and, of them, Fox has the largest audience, about 1.2 million viewers across its broadcast day. And while it's widely assumed that Fox's "niche" is hard-core conservatives, a study done of broadcast news last year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported that's not the case.

Fifty-nine percent of Fox's viewers reported that they believe all or a lot of what they hear on the network. Forty-one percent believe little or nothing of what they hear. CNN scored 70 percent in the top two believability categories. Fox scored just behind MSNBC, the "liberal" niche, and slightly ahead of the PBS NewsHour, the "elite" niche. Go figure.

Since that study was published, Barack Obama was elected president and politics has become more polarized. Fox News' commentators -- including Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity -- gleefully have done their part, in some cases inciting the very protests that they then piously "covered" as news.

Commentary is different from news and news is different from entertainment; viewers and readers should realize it. So should the president. So should Fox; if their people want to beat up on the president, they shouldn't expect him to do them favors.