On numerous occasions over the past few days I have switched to Fox News while other news channels were carrying live coverage of the Senate impeachment trial. I have done this notably during prime time, during Tucker Carlson’s and Sean Hannity’s shows.

Each and every time when the Democratic House managers are speaking, Fox only shows the live coverage in a small window with no audio, while its commentators rail against the process as hysteria and continue to promote debunked conspiracy theories.

Is Fox News so afraid to let its viewers at least hear the arguments on both sides and use their own thinking skills to decide for themselves what is true and what isn’t?

Because Fox commands such a significant market share of cable news, they have an obligation to deliver content that informs people and to present the public with both sides. Yet, they never do.

Their viewers should be outraged and insulted by Fox’s nefarious treatment of them. They are censoring news from their adult audience and treating them like children. This is right out of the playbook of totalitarian states, not the democracy we are supposed to be.

Over the past couple of months I have met with well over a dozen college classes at CSU-Sacramento and Consumes River College in Elk Grove, CA. I have had one-on-one conversations with many more eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 35.

A common theme is that many younger voters believe the 2016 Democratic nomination was “rigged” in favor of Hillary Clinton.

It is true that Clinton won the popular vote by 389 delegates. However, it was widely known months before the Democratic National Convention that most of the 649 “superdelegates” controlled by the DNC would be pledged to Clinton on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention. This fueled the perception that Clinton could not be beaten. In fact, numerous people I talked with voted for Clinton, even though they may have preferred Bernie Sanders, because they believed their vote for Sanders would be a wasted vote. In fact, had the majority of superdelegates been pledged to Sanders the result would have been very different.

Consequently, voter turnout among eligible voters aged 18-35 in the general election was the lowest of any age group, in part because they believed the process was rigged against the candidate the majority of them supported.

In 2018, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted to make it impossible for superdelegates to have the deciding vote on the first ballot at a national convention. In practical terms this means that superdelegates cannot vote in the first voting round if their support is going to decide the selection. If no candidate wins a majority in the first round, superdelegates get to vote in subsequent rounds.

While I would have preferred that the superdelegate process be eliminated entirely, the restructuring of superdelegates by the DNC going onto the 2020 election is, in my opinion, recognition that the process was flawed.

Eligible voters aged 18 to 35 will be the largest eligible voting block going into the 2020 election. They have the power to decide the future they will inherit. They must vote in the primaries if they want their preferred candidate to make it to the general election.