The Media Research Center’s Jorge Bonilla spent an Oct. 16 post gushing over the adversarial, gotcha-laden interview Fox News’ Bret Baier did with Kamala Harris:
When it was first announced that Vice President Kamala Harris agreed to a sit-down interview with Fox News, there were questions about what the intended outcome might have been, and what Harris might have expected to gain from what was going to be an interview far more adversarial than she is accustomed to. After watching the interview, it is clear that she did not expect to be asked tough questions.
The interview was contentious from the very beginning, and began with immigration. The first question was on whether Harris knew how many illegal migrants were released into the interior.
[…]Harris was rattled both by Bret Baier’s question, and by his refusal to allow her to non-respond with talking point word salad. Baier’s followup drilled deeper, with a focus on heinous crimes committed by illegal migrants. Harris wants to deflect to the dead-on-arrival comprehensive immigration bill filed on Inauguration Day, and on the failed Senate bill.
[…]Baier killed the talking point on the Senate bill by pointing out that six Democrats opposed the bill. He then pivots to saying the names of Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin and Laken Riley, who were brutally murdered by illegal migrants.
[…]The interview ends with Baier letting everybody know that Harris campaign staff was desperately trying to wave him off of her. Total train wreck.
[…]Bret Baier gave a masterclass of an interview to someone unaccostumed to having to answer tough questions outside of the respective liberal bubbles of D.C. and California. In so doing, he further exposed the sycophancy of the Regime Media.
Harris came into this interview hoping for more exposure to those unfamiliar with her ahead of a pivotal voting decision. Unfortunately, she got it.
What Bonilla thinks is a “masterclass” was really nothing more than Baier spouting his employer’s right-wing talking points. And when people outside the right-wing bubble pointed that out, the MRC had a fit. Alex Christy whined in an Oct. 17 post:
CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter joined The Source host Kaitlan Collins on Wednesday to react to Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier. Stelter tied himself into a rhetorical pretzel as he tried to simultaneously claim that Baier is basically “a Trump surrogate,” but also that “adversarial interviews are a good thing.”
Collins began by trying to figure out how well Harris did, “Not that Twitter’s real life ever, but looking at it, it seemed like a Rorschach test, right from the beginning. Of how people were going to see. Did she crush it? Did she blow it? What was the outcome of the interview?”
Stelter didn’t have anything to say on that front. Instead, he went straight to the Fox bashing, “I think Trump refused to debate Kamala Harris again. So, Harris did the next best thing. She booked a debate on Fox News, and that’s what this was tonight.”
He continued, “She essentially walked into a Trump campaign field office. Because anchor Bret Baier, who is a solid journalist, he is also incredibly sympathetic to Trump, because that’s what his fans want. That’s what his viewers want. His viewers want him to represent the Trump point of view. So, it was almost as if you had a Trump surrogate, interviewing Kamala Harris.”
Speaking of viewers, Stelter acknowledged Baier is “a solid journalist,” but he couldn’t just say that because his CNN viewers can’t accept that a non-caricaturized version of Fox.
Stelter also couldn’t make up his mind if Baier was performing a public service or trying to appease his audience, “And look, adversarial interviews are a good thing. We should root for them. We should want more of them. You know, you’re so fantastic at adversarial interviews, where we challenge newsmakers, and we get answers out of them.”
Meanwhile, The MRC is obligated to peddle a caricatured version of Stelter, and Christy leaned into that. He concluded by whining: “Republicans do tough interviews with non-Fox outlets all the time, and they almost never get praise for their toughness, nor does Stelter call those anchors Democratic operatives who try to appease their viewers, but Harris and Fox get different standards.” But Christy refused to actually admit that Baier is a Republican operative.
Mark Finkelstein similarly grumbled the same day:
Shades of a football coach explaining away his team’s loss by blaming the refs.
Rather than focusing on Kamala Harris’s evasive performance in her Fox News interview, today’s Morning Joe trained its fire on Bret Baier.
Mika led the hit parade, branding Bret’s performance an “embarrassing, bad-faith effort by a once-respected host.” She also claimed that Baier is “a man who spent his life as a down-the-middle journalist, seeming to throw it all away for his audience of one [i.e., Trump.]”
Mika also mysteriously claimed that Baier intentionally lured Harris into speaking over him. Really? I’m sure Bret would have preferred to get straight answers to his questions, rather than Kamala’s filibustering.
Then there was Donny Deutsch, who said he was “repulsed” by Baier.
And finally, MSNBC commentator and uber-elitist Anand Giridharadas, the Sidwell Friends alum and former consultant at McKinsey, where his father had been a director.
Giridharadas praised Mika for accusing Trump of “fascism,” and criticized the media for not using the word more often against Trump. Hilarious to make such an accusation on Morning Joe of all places, a show that has made a cottage industry out of accusing Trump of fascism, with this being just one of countless examples.
And, inevitably, Giridharadas also accused Baier of racism and misogyny, saying that as a member of the “old guard,” he interrupted Kamala because he couldn’t bear to hear a minority woman speak. “It just felt like a metaphor for a minority in this country that is angry at the notion that a rising, pluralist, more pluralist new America is speaking, is around, is here. And a desire to interrupt not just a person but the future.”
Funny how anyone who’s not as right-wing as Finkelstein is somehow an “uber-elitist.” He also failed to offer evidence of Giridharadas’ purpoted uber-elitism. And doesn’t the MRC also blame the refs when a right-wing politician has an interview go bad on a non-right-wing channel?
Nicholas Fondacaro worked the interview into his daily hate-watch of “The View,” complete with his daily lie about Sunny Hostin:
Bret Baier’s interview with Vice President Kamala Harris on Fox News was nothing like the gushfest she was treated to by her super fans on ABC’s The View; because she was asked tough, important questions, and wasn’t allowed to filibuster or lie. So, of course, that made Baier sexist according to the haters on Thursday’s episode of The View. They also smeared Fox News host Dana Perino by suggesting she was racist because she dared to criticize Harris’s nasty attitude during the interview.
Staunchly racist and anti-Semitic co-host Sunny Hostin (the descendant of slave owners) praised Harris for going on Fox News and insisted she managed to get Fox viewers to vote for her. “I think that there will be people that will change their minds. I think there will be people that were very shocked at that,” she proclaimed. “So the reason she appeared on Fox News is because she knows that there are openings for her there.”
She then lashed out at Baier, and laughably claimed he was a puppet of the “pro-Trump audience”:
But, you know, Bret Baier, he did himself a disservice by doing what he did. He is known for doing the bidding of Fox News. But he ends his show every night as fair, balanced, and unafraid. Well, that was not fair and balanced and he has this history of appeasing the network’s pro-Trump audience.
That was rich coming from a Harris interviewer whose idea of a pressing question was: “What do you think would be the biggest specific difference between your presidency and a Biden presidency?”
As a bonus, Fondacaro repeated his most ridiculous lie about Hostin: “she particularly hates white women, who she described as “roaches” if they vote Republican.” In fact, Hostin was using a metaphor, which Fondacaro still apparently doesn’t understand.
Curtis Houck took his turn:
ABC’s Good Morning America illustrated all anyone needed to know Thursday about what it made of Vice President Kamala Harris’s Wednesday night throwdown with Fox News host Bret Baier by the fact that it spent far less time (three minutes and two seconds) on this than they did browbeating former President Trump (four minutes and 11 seconds) over their preferred topics for this election, abortion and January 6.
Co-host George Stephanopoulos understood the assignment, claiming in a tease Wednesday’s 2024 discourse was about “January 6, mental stability and immigration” with Harris trying “to win over Republicans and blasts former President Trump as unstable and dangerous” and Trump “push[ed] claims about the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on the Capitol” and “abortion bans.”
Mary Bruce — chief White House correspondent and resident North Korean news lady for the Harris regime — must have received the message about our daily lambasting and decided to tone it down a smidgen, noting “she was pressed on her record” in a “heated” sit-down.
[…]On NBC, co-host Hoda Kotb called the Baier interview “combative” and said Harris “[made] her case to undecided voters while putting distance between herself and President Biden.”
Chief White House correspondent Peter Alexander said this was a chance to speak to viewers on “conservative Fox News” “who rarely hear her unedited.”
Houck didn’t dispute that last point, so we can feel free to interpret that as agreeing with what Alexander said.
Tim Graham tried to portray Baier as anything but a right-wing partisan in his Oct. 18 column:
It shouldn’t be considered incredibly brave for Kamala Harris to consent to an interview with Bret Baier on Fox News. J.D. Vance has been doing hostile Sunday shows for months while Harris resorted to the basement strategy.
[…]On the October 16 Special Report, Baier brought facts and numbers on tough subjects like immigration, and she didn’t want to deal with the substance. She wanted to repeat her usual pat answers about how everything that’s gone wrong is somehow still Donald Trump’s fault.
Democrats and their media enablers quickly denounced Baier as “rude,” as if they’ve never watched a hostile “mainstream media” interview with Trump or Vance or any Trump-backing Republican. He tried to be respectful, but not let her uncork her usual five-minute non-answers. This was “rude,” because you’re supposed to let her blather on and avoid the question.
While Fox News primetime hosts painted the interview as a disaster, CBS reporter Robert Costa comically relayed, “Democrats are feeling very good about” how she did. Earth to Costa: They would say that no matter how they thought she did.
The most revealing comment from the Left came from Alyssa Farah Griffin on The View, who slammed Baier for asking “the questions Fox News viewers want answers to.” Others have said the questions were “Trump talking points.” So when Baier asked about young American women and even 12-year-old girls who were raped and/or murdered by illegal immigrants, only Fox viewers care about that?
[…]My favorite Baier question was about Biden’s mental decline, which no one else has asked. “You told many interviewers that Joe Biden was on his game, that he ran around circles [sic] on his staff. When did you first notice that President Biden’s mental faculties appeared diminished?” She failed to acknowledge Biden is currently deficient in any way.
CNN’s Brian Stelter summarized the event: never mind her answers, “normies will just hear that she went into enemy territory and survived/thrived.” If you think she thrived in this interview, you’re definitely not a “normie.” They want to give her extra credit just for showing up.
Is that like how Graham and his MRC crew love to give bonus points to Vance for doing “hostile Sunday shows”?
P.S. Meanwhile, the MRC made no mention of the fact that Baier played the wrong clip of Trump for Harris during the interview (for which he later apologized), or that Baier himself admitted that Harris could benefit from “viral moments” from the interview.