This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

I have never been a Fox News fan.

Until now.

My newly found admiration for the cable network I have always seen as misleading and biased may not last long. But for now, I'm a fan.

That's because Fox News didn't back down to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's demand that its star political commentator Megyn Kelly be removed as a moderator in Thursday's debate or he would not participate.

Not having Trump on the debate stage surely would hurt the ratings and, perhaps, damage Fox's image a bit.

The Fox execs clearly wanted Trump to be there, and Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly practically begged him to reconsider his planned boycott.

But Fox wasn't willing to pay the price Trump demanded. Had the network caved and pulled Kelly from the lineup, it would have set a horrible precedent and dealt a significant blow to independent journalism in America.

Trump's bullying tactics seem to be getting more audacious as he remains at the top in the polls no matter what outrageous thing he might say.

Some of his behavior is troubling, given the possibility that he could become the nation's next commander in chief.

He expelled a popular Latino reporter from a press conference when the reporter tried to press him on his statements about Mexicans. He has had several hecklers thrown out of his speeches, telling his security goons to throw them out in the cold without their coats.

He is getting increasingly nasty toward anyone who criticizes anything he says or does and decided Kelly couldn't moderate the last GOP debate before the Iowa caucuses because he felt she had been "mean" to him.

The source of his apoplexy was Kelly's questioning of him in the first debate about disparaging remarks he had made about women.

But using his star power to dictate who in the media can ask him questions and who can not is not only wrong, it's dangerous.

If the media ever allows politicians to decide what questions they can ask and what stories they can pursue, democracy as we know it will crumble.

Thomas Jefferson famously said, "If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn't hesitate to choose the latter."

And that was at a time when Jefferson was being viciously attacked in early 19th Century partisan newspapers over his alleged affair with the slave Sally Hemming.

But he realized that without a free and independent watchdog press, corruption and tyranny in government could thrive.

The media has always been under attack, and often it was justified. But the service a free press provides far outweighs mistakes that are made or particular biases by some reporters or organizations.

That Fox is now under attack by a Republican politician and his followers is somewhat ironic, as Fox often has been on the front lines of the attacks on the so-called mainstream media.

But the mainstream media now should be backing Fox and its defiance of a politician's demands because that determination is what strengthens the Fourth Estate and what it stands for, given the protections it has laid out in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

When the late Arizona Gov. Evan Mecham was under investigation and facing impeachment efforts over allegations of misuse of public funds, he held a press conference to talk about his policy agendas for his administration.

Before the press conference began, reporters were told they could not ask any questions about the allegations against him.

They rightly ignored that order.

When one reporter brought up the issue, Mecham ignored him and said, "Next question." Then the next reporter asked the exact same question. When he was ignored, the third reporter asked the same question. And it happened again and again until an exasperated Mecham walked out of press conference.

This is how all reporters and news outlets should react to Trump. Whether all the questions reporters ask are fair or not, they never should be replaced by candidate-approved queries. —