Fox News Faces Its Moment of Truth: Will Baier Deliver, or Will the Network Crumble?

by Roger Simon

I suspect at least some of the powers that be at Fox News know to the degree they themselves are in, if anything, more jeopardy than Kamala Harris from Bret Baier’s interview with the candidate Wednesday.

Roseanne Barr “won the internet,” as the saying goes, with her posting on X after Baier had written “I want to hear from you—what would you ask @vp Harris? Send them to me here or on Instagram @bretbaier”.

Every wag from here to Alpha Centauri responded, very little of it friendly but a fair amount of it funny.

But no one was as accurate and telling as Ms Barr who, in her inimitable way, silenced the argument with:

“Ask her why she only goes on programs of people too weak to actually challenge her. Ask yourself this too while you’re at it.”

In so doing, she encapsulated the view of millions not only about Baier but about Fox News.

Many of us worry that the most popular cable news network has evolved into, possibly always was, a mass media “false flag” operation.

I write this admiring many of its contributors, some of whom I know personally.

But as long as you believe the time-tested theorem A. J. Liebling stated in 1960 – “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one”—those contributors, talented and often valuable as they may be, have made a pact with the devil.

The problem comes down to who actually owns Fox News. If you ask Google, that great obfuscating search engine is not able to do so in this case. It tells us what most people know. The Murdoch family controls about 40% of the shares. It continues: “Some of the largest institutional owners include Vanguard Group Inc., BlackRock Inc., Dodge & Cox, State Street Corp, and Yacktman Asset Management Lp.”

Many of the above, including the younger generation of the Murdoch family, are far from conservative or libertarian, nothing like the “reputation” of Fox. Vanguard and BlackRock, especially, have been known for their fealty to the extremes of wokeness.

Talk about controlling your enemies.

Bret Baier’s nightly Special Report is supposed to be the real, old fashioned news. Is that something to be aspired to? Some like to believe news was once even-handed. That’s

largely a fantasy. There was just less of it and that actually made it easier to manipulate.

Meanwhile, the nature of media is in flux. Some people now prefer Substacks. Others, sometimes overlapping, find the growing Newsmax more to their liking than Fox.

A whole new generation was born out of the blogging revolution in the early 2000s that has led many to be suspicious of spoon-fed news, even if comes from a supposedly “conservative” network.

Since then, media has been in constant revolution, its own version of creative destruction. The conventional right-left political terms, themselves an outgrowth of the French Revolution, may have become outmoded. They are certainly ripe for inspection.

Where does Fox stand in this? Roseanne Barr’s comment did not come out of nowhere. She won the internet because she used her great wit to reflect the views of millions.

Bret Baier undoubtedly noticed. He and his network will literally be up against the wall on Wednesday evening. If he doesn’t ask legitimate questions and follow them up, he’s toast, and Fox itself will take a serious, perhaps fatal, blow.

We can assume that his interview will not be recut in the buffoon-like manner exercised by executives at CBS’s 60 Minutes in their zeal to hide the incoherence of Ms. Harris.

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