Vice President Kamala Harris will sit down for an interview with Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier on Wednesday, reaching out to vi
Matt Gertz at MMFA:
Vice President Kamala Harris will sit down for an interview with Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier on Wednesday, reaching out to viewers of former President Donald Trump’s personal propaganda outlet in the closing weeks of the 2024 campaign.
Baier’s role at Fox is to provide his network with a sheen of credibility by producing a program that largely resembles a traditional newscast. His program prioritizes stories which flatter the right’s biases and soft-pedals or ignores damaging revelations about Trump. But his presentation is sober, a contrast to the enraged grievance-mongering of the colleagues who follow him in the Fox rotation.
As a result, Baier has received an unearned reputation for integrity from some journalists at mainstream outlets — and provoked occasional fits of anger from Trump, who prefers the sort of obsequious propaganda he has gotten from regular Fox interlocutors like Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiromo, and the late Lou Dobbs.
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Baier urged network executives to keep Fox from calling states for Biden
While Baier would like to move past Fox’s history of lying to bolster Trump’s 2020 subversion campaign, the Fox anchor is personally implicated in shocking breeches of journalistic standards with obvious ramifications for the coming election.
After Fox’s decision desk called Arizona for Joe Biden on election night — infuriating the Trump campaign and many Fox viewers — Baier urged network executives to overrule the decision desk in order to make amends.
Baier emailed Fox President Jay Wallace on November 5, 2020, to say that the decision desk’s Arizona call was “hurting us” and should be rescinded. He texted Tucker Carlson, who worried that the network could lose its audience to right-wing rivals, the same day, writing, “I have pressed them to slow. And I think they will slow walk Nevada.”
Fox did not retract its Arizona call, which was subsequently vindicated. But Wallace reportedly “overruled the Decision Desk team” soon after, “refusing to let them call Nevada for Biden even after other networks did.”
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While his “news” side colleagues left Fox, Baier reupped his contract
Fox’s PR team used to regularly highlight Baier alongside longtime network stalwarts Shep Smith and Chris Wallace to claim that the network had a credible news division. It is telling that Baier is the only member of that troika still employed by the network following what his former colleagues describe as its yearslong transformation into a Trumpist propaganda outlet.
After Smith abruptly resigned in 2019, he said “that his presence on Fox became untenable as opinion shows on the network spread falsehoods that hosts knew were lies.”
After Wallace left in 2021, he said it had become “unsustainable” to work at a network where people questioned who won the 2020 election and whether pro-Trump rioters storming the U.S. Capitol constituted an insurrection.
They aren’t alone.
Stirewalt said after his 2021 firing that during the Trump years, Fox became “an arm of a political party.” In March 2018, Fox strategic analyst Ralph Peters told colleagues that he would not renew his contract because Fox had become “a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.”
After longtime political correspondent Carl Cameron left in 2017, he explained that “over the years, the right-wing hosts drowned out straight journalism with partisan misinformation” and said the network’s stars were “allied” with Trump.
Bret Baier, the interviewer for Kamala Harris’s Fox interview tomorrow, has a long history of partisan right-wing behavior while masquerading as a “straight news” reporter.
He [Trump] decries fake news that isn’t and disseminates fake news that is. Think: China pays the tariffs. The wall is going up. Historic inauguration crowds. Russia probe is a witch hunt. You need an ID to buy cereal. Noise from windmills causes cancer. It’s endless. And now the Sharpie map that hurricanes Alabama.