The term “journalistic malpractice” is far too professional for what happened on Fox “News” earlier Wednesday evening; it was more like a category listing on Pornhub. The network’s supposed “straight news” anchor Bret Baier demonstrated why I choose to use quotation marks with the network’s name. Come to think of it, maybe “straight news” refers to sexual orientation targeted, not professionalism, because there was nothing professional about that interview. Baier stopped being a journalist and embodied virtually every conservative news site troll who solely watches his network: angry, ignorant, and ill-informed.
Kudos to Vice President Kamala Harris. Although she had to take a split second after Baier asked various questions to suppress a well-deserved smirk, she handled herself with integrity and grace. At times, though, her face went from concentrating to concerned as she repeatedly heard comments from a Fox “News” comment section pop out of the interviewer’s mouth. Baier made multiple, exceptionally obvious attempts to goad Harris into an insult about Trump supporters, Fox viewers or the network itself; they failed.
The questions about women killed by undocumented immigrants were nothing more than the live action version of nee-Twitter trolls posting “SAY HER NAME!” [A quick check of FoxNews.com for stories about undocumented migrants killing people during the Trump administration strangely brought up nothing relevant. Admittedly, it was a very quick check.]. Harris appeared rightly annoyed by Baier’s frequent, repetitious interruptions while she answered questioned, but she never lost her composure and at one point, cowed Baier to silence.
But the low point of the night–and perhaps in the entire history of the network’s “news” division–was the cherry-picked clip taken from the staged afternoon town hall with women pretaped, edited and aired on the network hours before the unedited Harris interview. After going on a rant about “the enemy within” and calling prominent Democrats “so sick” while calling for people to be rounded up in a section clipped before broadcast, the aired section showed Trump in about a 16-second segment when he said “They say I’m threatening; I’m not threatening anyone. They’re the one’s doing the threatening.. [blah, blah]… weaponization of government…” He finished with the aside they cut: “They’re the threat to democracy.”
To be clear, I do not believe that a purported “news” or “political” network that recently publicly paid a $787.5 million defamation settlement for its lies supporting the lie that the 2020 election was somehow illegitimate should be considered worthy to question a Vice President of the United States, let alone have a key interview with a major Party candidate. It cannot be taken seriously.
This, however, was clearly pandering to their assumed audience. They’ve read the comments sections’ posts; hell, they’ve created them. It has no journalistic value at all, except to show how professional and focused Harris was. (It also occurs to me that as a former city prosecutor in San Francisco, Harris likely has experience in dealing with people who live outside reality.) This is an off-the-cliff moment for the network, without the charm of Themla, Louise or the ’66 T-bird. There’s no turning back for Fox.