Fox News anchor Bret Baier proposed an hour-long special to debunk myths about election fraud — and executives at Fox ignored him, reported NPR on Monday.
"According to Baier's current and former colleagues, he stands very much alone at Fox News — which has been pushed even farther to the right since the onset of the Trump years," reported NPR.
"Anchor Shepard Smith left Fox News in 2019 after primetime star Tucker Carlson targeted him on the air and the network did not publicly defend him. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace departed and two commentators who frequently appeared on Baier's show resigned in late 2021 after Carlson's avid defense of people who participated in the violent attack on the U.S. Congress in January 2021."
"In one sign of his isolation, Baier repeatedly sought to devote an hour-long Sunday evening special following the 2020 elections to set out and debunk the leading myths bolstering Trump's baseless claims of fraud," said the report. "On 'Special Report,' Baier had addressed many of those individual claims, which had been promoted by Trump and embraced by many of his supporters. Baier told colleagues he thought the hour-long treatment would be an important way to show Fox's audience that it was taking their concerns seriously while presenting them with the facts about the election."
According to the report, not only did Baier never get approval for this pitch, Fox executives never even responded. Baier declined comment to NPR, and one unnamed Fox executive told the network, "By the time everything was moving forward, we were transitioning to covering Biden's first term. It was past the point of litigating this point any further."
All of this comes as Dominion Voting Systems is moving ahead with a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox for spreading conspiracy theories about its election equipment, a case that turns largely on evidence in internal communications that Fox executives and on-air personalities knew the claims they were promoting were false — and as a former producer at the network is simultaneously suing with allegations that Fox attorneys counseled her to withhold facts in a deposition on that subject.
Fox continues to deny any wrongdoing, and claims that Dominion's evidence is "cherry-picked."
