In 2020, Fox News personality Bret Baier privately worried that his network was losing viewers to other outlets even more willing to air Donald Trump’s lies about an election that he’d lost, especially since his employer had been the first to call Arizona for President Joe Biden.
“I have pressed them to slow. And I think they will slow walk Nevada,” Baier assured Tucker Carlson in a text message, made public as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit over Fox News knowingly airing false claims about the last presidential contest.
It was no surprise, then, that Baier acted more like a Republican partisan than a legitimate journalist during Wednesday’s prime-time interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. As The New York Times put in a headline, the Democratic nominee “Arrived for a Fox Interview. She Got a Debate.”
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From the start, Baier was not just adversarial — as would be expected and indeed appropriate: Harris, a grown woman seeking the most powerful office in the world, can answer a tough question or two — but acting as a “surrogate” for the Trump campaign, as one media critic put it. On immigration, he asked her to estimate how many asylum-seekers the Biden administration had released in the United States with court dates.
“Just a number: Do you think it’s one million? Three million?” he asked.
Baier then repeatedly........