After Fox News personality Bret Baier interviewed Vice President Kamala Harris — dispelling for reasonable viewers the GOP-promoted notion that Harris is “hiding” from challenging interview environments — Baier himself became the news.
First there was the take that, given how contentious the exchange was from the outset, Baier had been a virtual stand-in for Donald Trump, with the interview characterized as a second Harris-Trump presidential debate. (New York Times headline: Kamala Harris Arrived for a Fox Interview. She Got a Debate.)
[NOTE: Reporting on the interview, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies wrote: “Turns out, Harris not only was walking into unfriendly territory, it was downright hostile. Baier badgered Harris with Republican talking points, asked her tough questions (which was fair), and asked her some unreasonable questions (which was unfair).”]
Next, Baier became the subject for a show by one of his colleagues, Trump friend Sean Hannity, who asked Baier about his Harris interview.
Baier told Hannity that Harris put pressure on him by arriving a few minutes later than planned — to his mind a purposeful tactic by the Democrat nominee that he likened to “icing the kicker.”
(For those not versed in football gamesmanship, that’s reference to a defense calling timeout before a big field goal attempt in football, hoping the kicker will use the time to overthink and grow nervous about the task ahead.)
Ha. Fox News snowflake whines that Kamala Harris was prepared, composed, and tough. https://t.co/SqV736MulW
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) October 17, 2024
Did Baier grow nervous over the truncated timeframe? It was on his mind, he admitted. He also confessed to feeling used by Harris to achieve her goal, such as he envisioned it.
“She came to Fox News and she wanted to go after Donald Trump,” Baier told Hannity, “[to get a] viral moment that plays on a lot of other channels and on social media. And I think she may have gotten that.”
Baier said he thought Harris had a “mission” in going on Fox News, a patch of enemy territory firmly in the conservative media.
Sean Hannity painting Kamala Harris as the angry Black woman pic.twitter.com/zXx5gZ9RuV
— chris evans (@notcapnamerica) October 17, 2024
“I think [Harris] had a mission that she wanted to do and maybe she wanted to have a viral moment, she wanted to have a pushback,” Baier told Hannity. (Harris supporters said virtually the same thing about Baier — that he had a mission, wanted a viral moment, and wanted to create pushback.)
Baier seemed to express this as a revelation, despite knowing that any media appearance by a presidential candidate has an explicit mission — to emphasize a certain message or messages, to confront and/or debunk prevalent misconceptions, and to reach the audience that particular media platform offers the candidate.
(Note: Harris also appeared this week on the radio show of Charlemagne tha God, emphasizing a different communications goal, aimed at a different audience than Baier’s, as the Fox host well knows.)
The Harris campaign seems to agree with Baier about her using his platform to its advantage, boasting about her ratings on Fox.
We just posted this on Truth Social pic.twitter.com/Nh1sN3gbqr
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 17, 2024