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

Ailes, who had reached out to Axelrod to address rising tensions between the network and the White House, told him that Fox’s reporters were fair, if tough, and should be considered separate from the Fox commentators’ skewering the President nightly, said people briefed on the meeting. Axelrod said it was the view of the White House that Fox News had blurred the line between news and anti-Obama advocacy.

What both men took to be the start of a frank but productive dialogue proved, in retrospect, more akin to the round of pre-Pearl Harbor peace talks between the US and Japan.

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. There followed, beginning in earnest more than two weeks ago, an intensified volley of White House comments describing Fox as “not a news network”.

The subsequent heated back-and-forth between the White House and Fox News has brought delight to Fox’s conservative commentators. Speaking privately at the White House on Monday with a group of columnists and commentators, including Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert of The New York Times, President Barack Obama himself gave vent to sentiments about the network, according to people briefed on the conversation.

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