Thread by @AndrewFeinberg

(thread) I have some thoughts about @TheDemocrats decision to deny Fox News a debate based on reporting by @JaneMayerNYer showing how deeply the entire channel is intertwined w/ the @realDonaldTrump White House

@TomPerez made the right call. Here's why:

newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…

I know lots of folks are saying that Fox deserves a debate because the moderators would be reporters like Chris Wallace, Shep Smith, Brett Baier, and they deserve a chance to question Democratic primary candidates.

They are skilled journalists, but their skills aren't the issue.

The issue is that given what @JaneMayerNYer has revealed, it would be difficult, even for people who respect those reporters, to view the organization they work for as an independent news organization rather than an arm of the administration.

I know this from my own experience.

As some of you may know, I spent some time working for the wire service division of Russia's Sputnik News. My experiences there have been well-documented by many solid reporters, including me, so I won't rehash them all here except to tell you a story I haven't told before.

If you've read any of the accounts I gave of my time there or talk to journalists from other outlets who saw me workP during that period, they'd confirm that I made a point of sticking to actual journalism by asking tough questions and avoiding bad-faith bullshit ones.

But despite my efforts, I found that even a solid personal reputation wasn't enough to overcome the reality that my employer was deeply intertwined with Vladimir Putin's government in ways that echo to what @JaneMayerNYer found re Fox and the Trump White House.

I remember one time, I was working on a story about the new administration's difficulties filling out open national security positions with qualified people. I reached out to a former Bush 43 NSC and Pentagon official who'd turned down a job with the Trump administration.

This person is someone who I'd known for almost two decades, as far back as my high school days. He knew I would play things straight, but he still declined to participate, telling me something along the lines of "I know you're fair and independent, but your employer is neither."

Fox News may not be owned by the Trump administration the way Sputnik's parent company is owned by Putin's government, but the close relationship between the White House and the network's biggest names is similar to the ties between Kremlin folks like Putin & Dmitri Peskov and...

Dmitry Kiselev (president of Rossiya Segodnya, RT/Sputnik's parent company) and Margarita Simonyan (RT/Sputnik's Editor-in-Chief).

The issue isn't the quality of Fox's journalists, it's one of independence. Just like it didn't matter how good the work I tried to do at Sputnik..

...was when that outlet wasn't independent from Putin/Russia, it doesn't matter how good Fox Journalists like Chris Wallace, Brett Baier and Shep Smith are when their outlet is so close to the Trump White House it's often hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.