First it was Fox News. Now the White House is getting attention for going after a much smaller, albeit influential media outlet, car blog Edmunds.com. In a White House blog post yesterday, titled, “Busy Covering Car Sales on Mars, Edmunds.com Gets It Wrong (Again) on Cash for Clunkers,” Macon Philips said Edmunds.com released “faulty analysis suggesting that the Cash for Clunkers program had no meaningful impact on our economy or on overall auto sales.”

The blog shot back, stating, “instead of shooting the messenger, government officials should take heart from the core message of [our] analysis: The fundamentals of the auto marketplace are improving faster than the current sales numbers suggest.”

Our question is: why are people surprised they are using the blog to communicate in this manner, when they claimed they would do so from the beginning? In the first post on the blog, Phillips wrote, “Millions of Americans have powered President Obama’s journey to the White House, many taking advantage of the internet to play a role in shaping our country’s future. WhiteHouse.gov is just the beginning of the new administration’s efforts to expand and deepen this online engagement.” We’ve reached out to the White House media affairs team but have not heard back as of the time of this post.