I was listening to a spot on The New Yorker Radio Hourlast week,hosted by Editor David Remnick. This show has been a go-to of mine for years — a place I can find some safe harbor from the gathering storm in Washington.
You might have your own opinion on Remnick, or none at all, but I think he’s a smart guy, generally a great interviewer, and has been a part of some damn good journalism for most of my adult life. We are loose contemporaries, both from New Jersey, the same age, got our start as sports writers in the Garden State.
That’s where the similarities crash to a halt.
Remnick went big with his journalism career, landing gigs at The Washington Post and The New Yorker, winning a Pulitzer Prize along the way.
After beating the beat for 15 years, I swerved toward editorial management at midsize newspapers from Maine to Florida, before I helped serve the most important readers in the world — the troops and their families — as managing editor at the most important editorially independent newspaper in the world, Stars and Stripes.
I think it’s safe to say, Remnick and I both know what good journalism looks like, and believe it has never been needed more.
So when he had Fox News anchor Bret Baier on his show to help him sell a book, I grumbled but tuned in. At least I didn’t have to listen to a journalist sell another book, because Baier isn’t one of those. He’s a toothy frontman for the most dangerous lowbrow operation in America.
Baier is on staff at Fox to help legitimize the most crooked propaganda tool in America’s 249-year history.
Without Fox “News” there is no bought-off, radical-right Supreme Court or its tool, Donald Trump. During the past three decades, the station’s 24/7 propaganda has found the eyes and ears of millions of mostly white Americans to help them feel better about themselves, and their morbid fascination with the Year 1952, or thereabouts.
They are all brakes, no progress. An accelerator toward the complete absurd ...
And if you somehow do not think I am telling you the truth, then ask yourself why the most notorious liar in the world has stuffed his staff to overflowing with dozens of lying Fox veterans, including his revolting Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.
Fox helped make Trump, and Trump is busy repaying the kindness.
Remnick gave Baier 40 minutes, and I listened with clenched teeth. I thought Remnick conducted the interview fairly well, except for a few instances when he completely let the guy off the hook.
Baier has been with the propaganda dump for 27 years, and has become very good at playing the innocent “Who Me?” while he gaslights guys like Remnick to sell his soul and his books. He’ll tell you Fox is the innocent and necessary counterpoint to the “liberal media.”
This, of course, is where the trouble starts, because Baier knows there never was any “liberal media” when he was breaking in, and hadn't yet sold his soul to the highest bidder.
The term “liberal media” is sizzling propaganda that has been normalized in too many places as truth.
In more than three decades in the business, I never encountered these so-called boogeymen/women “liberal media” types, because they didn't exist. I’ll bet Remnick didn't either, and I dearly wish he would have said that during his interview with Baier, because that lie is the most toxic of all, and has led to every odious thing that has followed.
Screaming there was a “liberal media” was simply a way for conservative lowlifes like Rupert Murdoch to crash the party, and prey upon 72-year-old white men, who needed to blame somebody for their sore lower back, and all these women and people of color who were nudging ahead of them.
If you can lie to these people and convince them that the media has it out for them, you can slowly begin to pick their pockets ...
The smarmy Baier knows all this, but that eight-figure bribe, er, salary, is keeping him from saying it.
Remnick also pushed Baier on the company he keeps — Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, just to name a couple of the most disgusting people on camera — and wondered how that couldn’t affect the “straight-down-the-middle” journalist’s credibility.
Baier of course praised the opinionated “talent” that surrounds him, and couldn’t bring himself to say a bad thing about them. He just wanted you to know he operates inside some asbestos-fortified bubble, and far away from all that blaring noise.
I’m not sure he really believes this, but maybe it makes it easier to live with himself, because what he really is is the “straight” frontman that lends credibility to all these crooked acts that surround him.
That makes him one of the most dangerous guys at the station.
Essentially, he’s inherited the role the confused, disingenuous Chris Wallace used to play at the place. Both of them know where the bodies are buried at Fox, and neither of them is talking.
Remnick smoothly pressed on and asked about all the golf Baier plays with Trump, and wondered if maybe that didn’t affect his credibility. Baier didn't think anything of it, of course, and shot back, “If the President of the United States asked you to play a round of golf, wouldn’t you do it?”
Here’s where I thought Remnick would hit him between the eyes, because there’s only one correct answer to this question: “Yes, just as long as he understood he is playing golf with a journalist where everything he says is on the record, unless he stipulates instances where they aren’t. And when he cheats, well, that’s is definitely on the record because it reveals character.”
So fair would I be, in fact, that I’d even treat him to my first question: “Who do you think you are serving by playing all this golf?”
Remnick unfortunately never went there, but did ask about Trump’s contentious relationship with the press and the truth. After all, his former paper The Washington Post counted an astronomical 30,573 untruths during Trump's first presidency — an averaged of about 21 erroneous claims a day.
And, yes, the word “untruth” rips me, too, especially when journalists are taught to report things in the clearest terms possible. So the word “lie” works best here.
After a decade in the public eye, we know that Trump does nothing but lie from the time his fat little feet hit the deck in the morning, until the time he puts his nuclear-powered cell phone on the bedside table at midnight.
He’s a psychopath. Truth has no room in his gruesome life. He’s a two-timer and a double-talker.
Here’s what Baier said about that:
“I think it is this cat-and-mouse game. You know, for all of the things he says about the media … he’s reaching out and doing interviews with the same people he says are nasty.”
Baier also intimated that Trump talked to the press far more than Joe Biden did, and I’ll concede that point if by “talking” he means “raging” and “lying.”
Because here’s another thing that needs to be crystal-clear, and should have been put to Baier: ANYBODY can sit down with anybody and just lie to them without any consequences. THIS is the essence of fascist propaganda.
Trump STILL hasn’t conceded the 2020 election. To Baier’s tiny credit, he knows Biden won. And, BOY was A LOT of time spent on this one during the interview. Poor Bret talked about how isolating it was for him in all those rightwing circles to acknowledge Biden won.
Good grief, sonny. BOO-HOO.
THIS is what happens to people at Fox when they tell the truth. But Baier’s hanging in there and playing golf with his master because, well, all that damn money.
Which again begs the question, why is he or anybody, bothering with these so-called interviews, when Trump just uses them to spread lies and hate, while also berating these so-called journalists, while his chubby little hands flap around and do that weird accordion thing?
I’d argue the media needs to think about talking to Trump a helluva lot less, not more. As it is, he’s filling the White House “press” staff with an increasing number of rightwing stooges that are paid to make things as easy as possible on him.
I would have liked to hear Baier’s take on that, too.
Me? I say, starve Trump, and leave him and his thousands of lies hanging on his two-ton soap box. Nothing would make him angrier, and reveal more, which is the role of the working press.
This is not a healthy man.
Finally, if you fancy yourself a journalist, and are going to attend one of these “press” conferences, be ready to call a lie a lie. If you are insulted by the orange, unwell monster, simply say this:
“My job is to make sure I use my access to ask the questions my readers can’t. You can either answer these questions or not — up to you. But you will not insult me. You will comport yourself like a grownup, and we will engage thusly. America deserves at least that much. Now kindly answer my darn question. Thank you.”
(deep sigh)
For an old, cranky journalist, watching the current state of our media, and this fascist creep in our nation, has become just too tough to Baier.
Sermon over.
NOW READ: Trump's new assault is not a sideshow or a distraction — it's the whole game
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.