The Democratic National Committee decided not to partner with Fox News for its primary debates this year because leadership doesn’t trust the people “at the highest levels of Fox News,” not because it has an issue with Fox journalists, Chairman Tom Perez said.
During an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday evening, Perez said that he has “great respect” for journalists and Fox News hosts like Chris Wallace, who typically moderate debates for the network. But after the publication of the New Yorker story detailing Rupert Murdoch’s allegiance to Trump and how that impacted the network’s coverage of the 2016 election, the DNC decided to sever ties.
“I have great respect for Chris Wallace, and my concern is not about Chris Wallace,” Perez told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. “It’s about people above Chris Wallace. Because what we have seen now — and it’s been most recently now in the New Yorker story — is that at the highest levels of Fox News, they’re not playing it straight. And again, this isn’t about Chris Wallace. I have respect for him. But I do not have the confidence that we need to take such an important part of the nomination process, these debates, and trust them to folks who, at the top levels, are consulting Donald Trump before they do anything. I couldn’t do that.”
After the DNC announced that it wouldn’t work with Fox News during the primaries, Trump predictably jumped to his favorite network’s defense, threatening to “do the same thing” to CNN and MSNBC as the DNC did to Fox.
DNC chair says issue is with people at "highest level of Fox News," not journalists like Chris Wallace pic.twitter.com/vwWD1ng8eD
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) March 7, 2019
How many “journalists” are there at Fux, three, four?
Journalist’s at FUX? That’s like saying that GOP Congresscritters are honest.
It is an utter mystery why anyone might have thought this was a good idea in the first place. Maybe to get some access to supposedly open-minded Fox watchers? Like, who would that be? Net, and unsurprising, effect is an own goal by the DNC. Not reassuring about their general smarts and readiness to deal with 2020.
Now is when the pundits tut-tut this move and pretend that Fox engages in ‘journalism.’ They absolutely know that they are purely a propaganda outfit, but will pretend otherwise.
Personally, I’m so sick of the cable media and those like Perez that keep repeating this nonsense that Faux News, or tRump TV is semi-acceptable or semi-respectable because the caveat is that they still employ some actual ‘journalists’. This isn’t just about the owners and the highest levels there. That’s such a phony line since the only reason those ‘journalists’ are there is because it gives the channel some patina or fake veneer of respectability among fellow journalists. The bullshit is that there is no level of fake news that should be allowed. Period.
If they were real journalists with a working ethic they’d have left that fucking company the minute they learned of years of abuse towards women at that corporation, the amount of lies and propaganda their company is pushing 99.9% of the time on air, and the obvious ways they shill for tRump and the Republican party to the exclusion of all else. FFS, the company conducts spying on their own people. Fuck all these people that defend Faux as a quasi-news organization even in the slightest. They haven’t been a news organization for decades…and they’ve only gotten worse as time’s gone on. What’s really bad is that they now groom their watchers with incessant conspiracy theories that are made up out of whole cloth, not unlike infowars. How can any decent or respectable journalist associate themselves with this company without being compromised by their mission to deceive the public? They can’t.