Bret Baier desires a second go-around. After Vice President Kamala Harris’s first formal sit-down on Fox Information final week, the anchor, who was unusually aggressive in his questioning, is hoping she returns to the community quickly. “I’d like to attempt once more,” Baier tells Vainness Honest in an interview. “The extra candidates face robust however truthful questions, the higher it’s for viewers and voters, and really the higher it’s for candidates.”
Harris entered the lion’s den for an interview final week that served as a political Rorschach check, with Republicans mocking her efficiency and Democrats praising it, because the Fox Information anchor confronted scrutiny of his personal. (“This was grievance theater, not political journalism,” wrote one critic.) Baier kicked off the interview with a query concerning the variety of unlawful immigrants allowed into the nation underneath the Biden administration, which instantly devolved right into a heated back-and-forth. Inside seconds of offering her reply, Harris was interrupted by the anchor, who repeatedly pressed for a selected quantity as she tried to reply.
The combative sit-down was even parodied on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, with Alec Baldwin mocking Baier’s strategy within the present’s chilly open. In a single trade, Maya Rudolph as Harris tells Baldwin as Baier that he has to “pay attention” to listen to her reply to his questions, to which he quips, “Effectively, I can’t as a result of I’m speaking.” (Baier responded to Vainness Honest: “I laughed out loud a number of occasions and my sons thought it was very cool. Alec is welcome to visitor host on Particular Report anytime.”)
Some argued that, as anticipated, the Fox Information anchor challenged Harris greater than former president Donald Trump, whose first question from Baier was, “What do you suppose is crucial situation going through the nation proper now?” Baier defended his line of questioning to VF, saying, “It comes up in polls time and time once more about immigration being one of many high two points, together with the financial system.”
The Fox Information chief political anchor says that whereas there have been a number of cases wherein he allowed Harris to supply her “speaking factors” to the viewers, his interruptions have been in an effort to “redirect,” including that if he didn’t, her “lengthy solutions” would “eat up on a regular basis of this interview that was live-to-tape.” Baier continued that Harris “even acknowledged, ‘You recognize what I’m going to say,’ and I used to be attempting to get in and say, ‘Sure, however that is what I’m asking particularly.’”
He additionally pushed again on criticism that he challenged Harris greater than her opponent, saying, “Should you look again on the Donald Trump interview, I had the identical form of interruptions when there was clearly an effort to go down a talking-points highway.” Baier says that his interview with Trump was “a lot the identical tenor, to attempt to get them again on the subject that you simply’re asking about.” The Republican candidate clearly stumbled in that June 2023 interview; “Trump’s Fox Information catastrophe” is how Axios summed it up.
Nonetheless, all through final week’s interview, Baier interrupted Harris not less than 38 occasions in 27 minutes, which was about twice as usually as he interjected in Trump’s interview, in keeping with CNN. “I get the criticism,” Baier says. “I get the questioning whether or not that was completely different. However should you look again on that one-on-one with former president Trump, he didn’t prefer it on the time.”
Courtesy of Fox Information.
Whereas Fox Information tried to get each Harris and Trump to conform to debate, Baier says he’d additionally been requesting an interview with the Democratic candidate. Earlier this month, the Harris marketing campaign requested if he’d be interested by a sit-down in a battleground state, he recollects. “I mentioned, ‘Completely, no matter you guys give us, we’ll make it occur,’” Baier says. “In order that started the logistics speak, and we ended up in Pennsylvania.”
Past the on-camera fireworks, there was additionally some drama behind the scenes. Because the interview was set to be taped, Baier says the Harris marketing campaign pushed very near the 5:18 p.m. cutoff for the community to have the ability to flip it round for Baier’s 6 p.m. present, Particular Report. It ended up being a “time crunch,” he says. In accordance with Baier, Harris “was within the constructing” forward of time however didn’t come into the interview room till 5:17 p.m., “so we have been sweating whether or not we have been going to have the ability to flip the tape round.” Even nonetheless, he says Harris was “very cordial,” and “the employees was very useful setting all of it up.”
“We welcome them again as a result of I feel these exchanges illuminate issues for voters and viewers,” he added.
