While much attention has been paid in recent months to the shocking comments that Tucker Carlson made about Trump and his colleagues inside Fox News, Bret Baier has managed to escape much of the scrutiny in the press. But the leaked messages exposed that Baier, like others at the outlet, feared its Trump-supporting audience and seemingly went as far as to urge that editorial decisions be made to placate its viewers, a brazen breach of journalistic norms.
Many thought that while Baier was personally someone who “leaned right” he was also someone who stuck to journalistic standards and wouldn’t do and say things that were untrue just to appease viewers.
That reputation, however, has been neutered in the past few months by the release of leaked private text messages sent after the 2020 presidential election, casting the “Special Report” anchor in a much different light.
On Thursday, the Daily Beast reported that Bret Baier and now-former host Tucker Carlson engaged in a conversation on November 4, 2020, about the need to delay Fox News’ call of the election. Both men complained that they were receiving blowback from their Trump-supporting viewers over the network’s controversial early projection that then-candidate Joe Biden would win the state of Arizona, putting him on the brink of capturing the White House.
“We need to do something to reassure our core audience,” Carlson wrote Baier in the wake of the Arizona call, according to The Beast. “They’re our whole business model.”
Baier replied that he had been “pushing for answers.” He then added, according to The Beast, “I have pressed them to slow. And I think they will slow walk Nevada.”
Baier wasn’t interested in the actual election results, apparently. He was in lock-step with Carlson in prioritizing keeping viewers docile and content regardless of actual facts.
So far, Tucker Carlson is the only head that was put on a stick after Dominion forced them into a dramatic settlement just as the case was about to go to trial. But it has become more obvious with each new revelation that many more like Bret Baier were fully on board to deceive their viewers just to keep them glued to their televisions. He may have not used as inflammatory language as Carlson, but it basically comes down to a case of “six of one, half-dozen of the other.”
The report in The Beast comes after a revealing March story from The New York Times that quoted Baier pushing Fox News President Jay Wallace to nix the channel’s Arizona call and “put it back in [Trump’s] column,” — even though it was never in Trump’s column.
Typically, anchors have no say in making election calls. That process is left up to a network’s decision desk. And in the actual news world, decision desks base their calls off of data and voting statistics, without taking into consideration politics or potentially alienating a channel’s audience.
“There has been some misdirection in the sense that all of the coverage tends to flow to the most outrageous behavior and less outrageous behavior, but still extremely troubling behavior, gets less attention,” Erik Wemple, a media critic at The Washington Post said. “I think that’s the case with Baier.”
