Fox News anchor Bret Baier recently got flack from his audience for daring to get the COVID-19 vaccination (and admit it publicly), and unlike most other Trumpophantic Fox personalities, his pro-Trump bias was only expressed “very slyly.” He’s one of Fox News Channel’s more respectable journalists, covering the hard news, and leaving the political commentary to others.
But a new analysis of over a decade of Bret Baier’s Special Report shows its treatment of climate change is virtually indistinguishable from the opinion programming that’s too toxic for mainstream advertisers. Media Matters examined 972 segments of Baier’s show, and found misleading narratives in 851 of them — over 87%. The same professional disinformers who turn industry money into political propaganda in part by going on Fox’s opinion shows, like Marc Morano, were regularly booked for Baier’s supposedly straight news show.
Media Matters found the correspondents and guests Baier has had on his show “undermined, doubted, misrepresented, or otherwise dismissed climate science and the urgency of climate action at least 1,333 times.”
And it's not like this is some sort of new, Trumpian-audience-influenced development. In fact, denial was down during the Trump years, compared to when Obama and Biden were in the White House. During the first year of President Obama’s first term, Baier ran four times more “false or misleading narratives attacking climate science” than it did in Trump’s first year.
Now that President Biden has put climate action back onto the national agenda, Special Report has ramped up it’s denial as well, putting out three times more climate denial than it’s weekly 2020 rate.
Allison Fischer, director of climate and energy at Media Matters explained to Jeff Dembicki for VICE News the report shows "Special Report is situated firmly within the broader climate denial machine, which is really good at ramping up and pushing misinformation at moments when climate action is most possible.”
In defense of their straight news anchor being revealed as no different from their other partisan hacks, neither Fox nor Special Report responded to Dembicki with a comment on the record. But, Dembicki notes, “Fox News insists that anchors like Baier do legitimate journalism and the network shouldn’t be judged by its more well-known opinion hosts like Carlson and Ingraham.”
Fox News has always pretended that there is a difference between it’s incendiary and partisan opinion programming like Tucker Carlson, who Fox admits in Court you shouldn’t take to be “stating actual facts,” and it’s news side, where honest reporters like Chris Wallace supposedly just read the news to viewers without bias or commentary. That’s always been a lie, but for some reason it’s one that even otherwise smart mainstream media critics seem to readily accept.
For the past few years, advertisers have been dropping slots during Fox’s opinion shows like Tucker Carlson, leaving the news-side programming relatively unscathed. But as Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda channel continues its purge of any lingering non-Trump voices, it can likely expect even more pressure.
And it’ll try to hide behind anchors like Baier, but as this report makes clear, Fox’s opinion and news distinction has always been one without meaning.