Kamala Harris is scheduled to be interviewed by Fox News anchor Bret Baier tomorrow. He may be less nakedly partisan than Sean Hannity but Baier is just a less overt member of the Fox propaganda team.

Fox News has touted Special Report anchor Bret Baier as embodying “the ultimate journalistic integrity and professionalism.” Indeed, he is probably the most widely esteemed member of Fox’s “news” division, though that’s an astonishingly low bar.

Yet, he’s the guy who suggested recanting the network’s 2020 call for Biden in Arizona, and putting it “back in [Trump’s] column” because he thought it would be better for Fox to do so. Even though Arizona had never been in “Trump’s column.”

Baier sometimes bucks Fox orthodoxy, but he seems to lack the courage to do so in any meaningful way. For example, on November 5, 2020, when Joe Biden had not yet been declared the election winner, Baier, along with his fellow “ultimate journalist” Martha MacCallum, whitewashed Donald Trump’s dangerous, lie-filled attacks on the election. Baier summed up Trump’s comments as “Stealing an election, corruption, leveling a lot of charges, the president of the United States, who we haven't heard from really since the early morning hours after the election, and now this battle continues with his campaign fighting in numerous states.”

Baier is also not infrequently complicit with the propaganda. There was the time he promoted the right-wing messaging around the Durham investigation – even as his own guests repeatedly debunked the supposedly big story. He allowed Michigan’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon to discuss her “concerns” that the 2020 election had not been handled properly in Michigan without telling viewers that the same “concerns” had already been rejected and debunked by her own party.

He is also good at feigning the role of tough questioner by expressing incredulity without challenge. He did exactly that when then-White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told him the obvious whopper that Trump’s good wishes for Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s now-convicted pedophilia collaborator, meant he was concerned she might commit suicide. Lying McEnany is now a cohost of Fox’s Outnumbered show, it’s worth mentioning.

Media Matters’ Matt Gertz has a good explainer of how Baier gives the false impression of being a good journalist:

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.

Gertz goes on to provide two important examples. One, Baier’s “scoop,” five days before the 2016 presidential election, that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted: “The Fox anchor, who had sourced his report to two unnamed ‘sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations,’ turned out to have seemingly been serving as the witting or unwitting mouthpiece for an anti-Clinton faction within the bureau.” Baier apologized and walked back the story but not until after his “bombshell generated hours of coverage on his network.” Clinton was not indicted, you may recall.

The other good example is about Baier’s off-air behavior. “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,” Gertz wrote. “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. Others, such as former chief political correspondent Carl Cameron, analyst Ralph Peters, and contributors Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, left for similar reasons.

But Baier? He “signed a new contract and traded up to a $37 million Palm Beach estate,” Gertz wrote.

You can best believe that Baier will hold the network priorities behind that paycheck foremost in his mind when he interviews Harris tomorrow.  

(Baier image via screengrab)