Democrats: The decision to shun Fox
The Democratic National Committee has declared it won’t allow a racist “propaganda outfit” to host the party’s 2020 presidential debates, said Eric Levitz in NYMag.com. In other words, Fox News is out. DNC chair Tom Perez announced last week that Fox would be excluded from the debates, citing a “bombshell” New Yorker article that, he said, proved the network had an “inappropriate relationship” with President Trump. That article reported that Fox tipped off Trump to questions before a 2015 GOP primary debate and killed a story in 2016 about his “affair with Stormy Daniels and his efforts to buy her silence,” then demoted the reporter who’d “acquired hard evidence” of the scheme. A media outlet that punishes reporters for digging up politically inconvenient stories is not “a legitimate news network.”
Sure, and NBC, CBS, and ABC—“not to mention the cartoonishly biased MSNBC and CNN”— aren’t in bed with the Democrats? asked Mollie Hemingway in TheFederalist.com. These liberal outlets pretend to be “straight news” but fill their airtime with attacks on Republicans and fever dreams about Russian collusion. Yes, Fox’s opinion hosts openly support Trump, but its news hosts—including Bret Baier, Chris Wallace, and Martha MacCallum—“are far more objective” than obvious lefties at other networks, such as Jake Tapper of CNN and Chuck Todd of NBC. For Perez to shun Fox News as nonobjective is laughable. It’s also “a huge mistake,” said Matt Laslo in NBCNews.com. Plenty of swing voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan tune in to Fox frequently. Democrats aren’t punishing Fox; they’re punishing themselves.
That’s a legitimate concern, said Greg Sargent in The Washington Post. But Fox is fundamentally different from news organizations with liberal leanings. It is now in the business of spreading “disinformation” and has wholly joined in the Trump administration’s efforts to convince millions of Americans that the intelligence agencies, the Justice Department, and Congress “no longer have any legitimacy.” Fox shamelessly promoted the Obama “birther” nonsense, and the slanderous conspiracy theory that Democratic official Seth Rich was murdered by the Clinton campaign. True, said Jack Shafer in Politico.com, but being president means “confronting tough customers.” Any candidate “who can’t hold his own against a journalist from the other team should be disqualified from running.”