Preferably something other than nazi, russian, dkys, etc from the posters who know who they are.
DNC Blacklisting Of Fox News Proves GOP Needs To Fight Media
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 presidential 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.
Let's see how many contributors actually read the articles. And how many cogent, constructive posts appear from the DPST's!
In stiff-arming Fox News, Democrats get one big thing right
In this week’s New Yorker magazine, Jane Mayer amassed an impressive array of newly reported details demonstrating that Fox News has, at its core, ceased to be anything resembling a right-leaning news network and instead has basically merged with President Trump’s reelection operation.
The piece reported on various things Fox News may have done on Trump’s behalf, such as kill unflattering stories (which was disputed). It reported that numerous Fox hosts, such as Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, regularly offer private advice to the president (which, to my knowledge, is not disputed). And multiple Fox employees have cycled into the White House.
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But the real scandal is in the day-to-day messaging that blares forth from Fox, which has become akin to what one observer describes to Mayer as “state TV."
“As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword,” Mayer writes. "In the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States.”
Trump spends his morning “executive time" tweeting out messaging (as we know thanks to Matthew Gertz’s Twitter feed) that is lifted straight from programs like “Fox & Friends.” As Mayer puts it: “The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead."
All of which has led the Democratic Party to nix the possibility of any Democratic primary debates hosted by Fox News:
"The Democratic National Committee has decided to exclude Fox News Channel from televising any of its candidate debates during the 2019-2020 cycle as a result of published revelations detailing the cable network’s close ties to the Trump administration.
"In a statement Wednesday, DNC Chairman Tom Perez cited a story in the New Yorker magazine this week that detailed how Fox has promoted President Trump’s agenda."In that statement, Perez said:
"Recent reporting in the New Yorker on the inappropriate relationship between President Trump, his administration and Fox News has led me to conclude that the network is not in a position to host a fair and neutral debate for our candidates. Therefore, Fox News will not serve as a media partner for the 2020 Democratic primary debates."I confess to being a bit agnostic about this. It’s true that the Fox reporters who would have served as moderators, such as Chris Wallace, have a history of being tough on Republicans as well (see his crucifying of Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller). It’s possible they would have been reasonably fair to the Democratic candidates (though the risks of bad-faith efforts to sabotage the Democratic candidates are obvious, particularly after Mayer’s report).
But a key part of the motivation behind this decision is a recognition that Fox News is fundamentally in the business of spreading disinformation, as opposed to conservative reportage. And the recognition that as such, Fox is at the throbbing core of something that has become a major blight on American political life is correct and important.
Some reporters are complaining that Democrats are passing up a chance to reach voters they might otherwise not reach. One supposes this is at least a possibility. But this complaint, I think, also betrays an unwillingness on the part of many neutral journalists to acknowledge just how bad the disinformation asymmetry of this particular moment has gotten, and just how pernicious Fox’s particular contribution to it has grown.
Indeed, some of the most important revelations in the New Yorker go to this point. Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg recounts that he quit appearing on Fox, after a run-in with a host persuaded him that the network had mostly given up on treating Democratic surrogates as legitimate debate opponents, in part because such conduct pleased the White House. Rosenberg noted that the White House has become one of Fox’s “masters,” adding: “Fox is no longer conservative — it’s anti-democratic.”
Even worse, as Mayer reported, a good deal of Fox content has become all about shoring up Trump’s political support against intensifying scandals and Democratic oversight. As Nicole Hemmer, a historian of conservative media, told Mayer, Fox isn’t merely the preferred network of the Trump/GOP base, but is actively trying to intensify Trump’s hold on it.
“Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base -- it’s raising the temperature,” Hemmer said. “It’s a radicalization model.”
This has become only more inescapably true, now that Democrats are stepping up their oversight efforts. Some of the messaging from Fox personalities in response no longer has anything in common with good faith conservative opinion. It no longer resembles anything approaching good faith argumentation to the effect that Trump’s extensive and already-documented misconduct and corruption do not merit the criticism and oversight they’re receiving. It sounds nothing like healthy skepticism, from a conservative perspective, of the conduct of congressional Democrats or intelligence and Justice Department officials.
Instead, much of it is plainly about deceiving millions of voters into believing that core functionings of our government -- whether it is law enforcement or congressional oversight -- no longer have any legitimacy. It’s rank propaganda, pure and simple, directed at insulating Trump from any measure of accountability, and at fortifying the ranks of the base in preparation for the wars over Trump’s intensifying oversight and legal travails to come, in advance of his reelection campaign.
I don’t know whether boycotting Fox successfully sends a larger message to the country about what the network has become, or whether there are downsides to doing this. While scuttling any debates on Fox seems rooted in a reasonable reading of their downside risks, I don’t feel strongly, as others do, that Democrats should as a rule refuse to appear as guests across the board. That seems like a choice individual Democrats ought to make.
But, to the degree that Democrats are standing for the proposition that Fox has become an irredeemably malevolent and destructive force in our discourse and politics, they are getting a big and very important thing right.
The DNC and minions have labelled Fox network as "an irredeemably malevolent and destructive force in our discourse and politics" as above.
Clearly this an aggressive move by DNC and MSM to censor the non-DPST opinions of Fox news. The attitude is - "do it my way, or i will take my marbles home and refuse to play. "
Should the RNC retaliate in the same form of censorship - I think not. Time to call out the DPST's on their move toward One Party and control of the Media totally. They seek to squelch and prohibit all opinions not consistent with DPST ideology.
Call it what it is - Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Kim ,Xi would all identify with the DPST /DNC moves.
