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Fox News anchor Bret Baier is all too keenly aware that Fox’s viewers want him to affirm what they already feel.
This week, he is under pressure as he prepares for a high-stakes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris – the Democratic nominee for president’s first-ever formal interview on the right-wing cable network.
Fox is effectively a television extension of Donald Trump’s campaign. Hour after hour, conservative talking heads pummel Harris and promote Trump with little regard for the facts. Analysts have described the vice president’s appearance on Fox as a surprising visit to “enemy territory.”
Baier has tried to position himself above that partisan fray as “fair, balanced and unafraid,” as he says in his sign-off every night.
But a review of Baier’s emails and comments during the 2020 election aftermath suggests otherwise. And his recent social media activity shows that he is supremely aware of the Fox base’s extreme disdain for Harris and distrust of the media.
Baier, the anchor of Fox’s 6 p.m. “Special Report” newscast, is also the network’s chief political anchor. Alongside Martha MacCallum, Baier anchored Fox’s 2020 election coverage and announced the network’s early but accurate projection that Arizona’s electoral votes would be won by Joe Biden.
Networks ordinarily like to be first with pivotal projections. But because the Arizona call presaged Trump’s defeat, Fox was scolded and second-guessed by many of its own viewers, including the sitting president.
A day and a half later, in a Thursday morning email to Fox executives, Baier said the Arizona call was “hurting us,” adding, “this situation is getting uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. I keep on having to defend this on air. And ask questions about it. And it seems we are holding on for pride.”
Baier said Fox would be “better” off revoking the accurate Arizona call.
“The sooner we pull it — even if it gives us major egg — and we put it back in his column, the better we are in my opinion,” he wrote. The only problem: Arizona was never going to be in Trump’s column.
Baier’s emails were publicized as a result of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox after the 2020 election. Fox’s parent company paid $787.5 million to settle the case.
In another email during the fractious period when votes were being counted and the presidential election was up in the air, Baier described being tired and “pissed.” When one of his Trump-supporting friends commented that “it ain’t over,” Baier replied, “There is NO evidence of fraud. None.”
But the Fox audience wanted to hear otherwise, and Baier sometimes obliged. Fox’s top news official in Washington at the time, Bill Sammon, commented in an early December email that “more than 20 minutes into our flagship evening news broadcast… we’re still focused solely on supposed election fraud — a month after the election. It’s remarkable how weak ratings makes good journalists do bad things.”
Sammon was referring to Baier’s newscast, which indulged Trump’s post-election lies like many other Fox shows.
It is also true that Baier reported on air that Trump lost the election and Biden won. But Baier expressed a remarkable degree of sympathy for the Trump base’s unsupported screams about a stolen election.
At a November 16, 2020 Zoom meeting that was recorded and later obtained by The New York Times, Baier implied that the network needed to rethink how it made projections in the future. The “statistics” are one thing, “but there has to be, like, this other layer,” he said, suggesting that the audience’s expectations and emotions should be factored in.
That’s certainly happening now, in the final stretch of the 2024 campaign, as Harris tries to win over the exact type of persuadable voters who watch Baier’s “Special Report.”
Almost as soon as Baier announced his Wednesday sit-down with Harris, some uber-skeptical commenters on Elon Musk’s X replied to him with doubts and conspiracy theories about the interview.
“This interview will be as watered down as they come,” one user wrote.
“No doubt she already has the list of questions,” another chimed in.
“I don’t trust Fox and I trust Baier even less,” a third user bemoaned.
The comments demonstrated an automatic distrust of news anchors, media outlets and American institutions. That lack of trust is what shapes right-wing culture in the Trump era. Even Fox is not immune.
Baier acknowledged the Trump base’s default settings by stating that his interview with Harris will be “unedited” – in contrast to some of the vice president’s other interviews. (Although editing is a normal TV news practice, Trump and many of his allies have called the practice into question in recent weeks.)
Baier said on his program Tuesday night that Wednesday’s interview “will run unedited, uninterrupted, without commercial breaks for the first half of Special Report.”
Still, the Harris interview will be pre-taped because her campaign schedule doesn’t permit her to talk live with Baier at 6 p.m. ET. And even this basic fact caused some Fox fans to send conspiratorial messages to Baier.
One X user told Baier they believed that the interview will “be pre recorded and the answers will be edited. Because Fox News is (like others) FAKE NEWS!”
Baier tried to reassure the user, saying “it will be as-live — not edited – run from beginning to end – no changes – period.”
The anchorman also responded to other users to assure them that Harris doesn’t have access to his questions in advance, and “there were no preconditions to get the interview.” He bent over backwards to explain the basics of television news to an audience that automatically assumed the worst about his craft.
To the X user who predicted the “taped” interview will be “greatly cleaned up before it’s aired,” Baier responded: “Thanks Dennis – the interview will run as-live – unedited – uninterrupted – without commercials – not ‘cleaned up.’ All of it will air from the first word to the last. Thanks for your confidence – hope you tune in.”
