By Mollie Hemingway • The Federalist
The Democratic National Committee is refusing to allow Fox News Channel to televise any of its candidate debates during the 2019-2020 cycle, according to the Washington Post.
DNC Chair Tom Perez cited an article written by liberal journalist Jane Mayer of The New Yorker for his decision. Her article alleged that Fox News Channel, which has been less hostile and hysterical about the man elected president by the United States electorate than its counterparts at every other television outlet, was too close to the Donald Trump White House.
Fox News’ opinion hosts include Trump-loving Sean Hannity. Its news hosts, including Bret Baier, Martha MacCallum, Shannon Bream, and Chris Wallace, are far more objective than those at other broadcast media outlets. Liberal Trump critic Shep Smith is also billed as a news host. Other media outlets frequently blur the line between news and opinion, with CNN hosts Jake Tapper, Brian Stelter, Chris Cuomo, and Don Lemon mixing their liberal opinions with occasional bouts of news.
In recent years:
- NBC sat on evidence exonerating Justice Brett Kavanaugh, discrediting Michael Avenatti and his clients’ accusations.
- CBS published false documents to smear President George W. Bush.
- CNN fed debate questions to Hillary Clinton before a primary debate.
- ABC helped Democrats launch their “war on women” campaign strategy in 2012.
- And CNN attacked Mitt Romney during a debate when he said true things about the Benghazi terror attack.
That’s just a few off-the-top-of-the-head examples of media and Democratic Party collusion regarding election year issues and debates. But it’s a problem that exists so constantly as to be a crisis.
NBC’s Chuck Todd showed his legendarily extreme bias on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” show. He falsely claimed Rep. Jim Jordan was sharing opinion, not facts, when he accurately discussed Michael Cohen’s testimony that he’d never been to Prague — a central claim of a discredited dossier, secretly funded by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, secretly fed to media outlets and intelligence agencies, and used to undermine the Trump administration for more than two years.
But when Sen. Mark Warner claimed there was evidence of collusion with Russia, Todd didn’t push back in any way, despite the lack of evidence. Last year, Tapper, a former gun control spokesman, hosted a rally that spun up a mob against gun rights and Dana Loesch while letting a corrupt sheriff off the hook.
The Democratic National Committee, whose allies select stories, frame those stories, and write and broadcast those stories at nearly all other major media outlets, has every right to use its media-enabled power against Fox News Channel, which tends to be less aligned with Democrats. It makes sense that the DNC would only want friends and ideological allies to question them in debates, particularly when they only need to ostracize one media outlet to accomplish that.
The question is, why do establishment Republicans allow Republicans to be treated as second-class citizens? They sit back and lamely accept the false narrative that Fox is a crazy right-wing propaganda network while the other media outlets are treated as straight news. This is pure gaslighting.
Which broadcast outlet, among NBC, CBS, ABC — not to mention the cartoonishly biased MSNBC and CNN — is not severely biased against Republicans and their domestic policy goals? The Washington Post is not neutral, as its full-court advocacy to utterly destroy the life and reputation of Kavanaugh reminded those who hadn’t figured it out in previous decades.
Most of its stories show this. To take, again, but one recent example of out many, the Washington Post’s smear today of a Christian judge reads as if it were lifted directly from the public relations arm of the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center.
In what sense is The New York Times not the propaganda arm of the Democratic National Committee? Why, then, do Republicans let their declared enemies set the terms of their own debates?
Instead, Republicans play a big game of pretend, dutifully going on shows hosted by activists Todd and former Bill Clinton spokesman George Stephanopolous — two hosts who are far, far, far less impartial than Baier and Wallace.
The excuse the DNC used to boycott Fox was the story spun by Mayer, a woman known at least as much for her sloppy journalism as for her far-left activism. She was one of the bylines on one of the journalistically indefensible smears of Kavanaugh before his confirmation. The first “conservative” Mayer quoted to attack Fox News was Bill Kristol. I stopped reading when the second alleged “conservative” was the Post’s Jennifer Rubin.
The liberal activists at other networks and media outlets lapped up Mayer’s story. In response to the DNC boycotting Fox, CNN’s anti-Republican media analyst Brian Stelter wrote, “Yes, Fox has a news division. But Fox is mostly defined by its opinion division, where hosts and guests demonize Democrats from morning til night.”
This from the network that has for years obsessively pushed in its news programming, which is also its opinion programming, an insane conspiracy of treasonous collusion with Russia to steal the 2016 election. It perhaps should be noted that CNN got in a bit of trouble when one of its employees was caught passing debate questions to Clinton during the 2016 primary.
In any case, one of the reasons Trump was successful and won the presidency was that he declined to play the game where he treated the media as if they weren’t biased and facing massive credibility problems. Do other Republicans enjoy being treated like second-class citizens? Do they think they must accept it?
What are they going to do going forward? The media aren’t getting better. They’re getting worse. And the alliance between Democrats and the media grows stronger every day. Is this of interest to establishment Republicans?
It is long past time for Republicans to acknowledge that nearly all of the major media outlets view Republicans as their political enemies. Given the media response today to Democrats blacklisting Fox News Channel, they have set the precedent that it is perfectly acceptable for Republicans to do the same with media organizations that have shown they have neither the desire nor the ability to honestly and fairly moderate political debates, much less intra-party debates or discussions that include Republican officials and the views they hold.