Bret Baier returned fire on Thursday over criticisms former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd seemed to recently direct at the Fox News anchor, dryly noting that he’s about to interview United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer while Todd appears to have nothing going on.
Todd, who left NBC News after 17 years last month, appeared to take a swipe at Baier — without mentioning his name — during a podcast appearance with The Bulwark’s Sam Stein last week.
At the time of the interview, only a handful of Fox News reporters had publicly opposed the White House’s ban on the Associated Press over Donald Trump’s “Gulf of America” complaint. (The network eventually signed a letter by the White House Correspondents’ Association supporting the AP.) Stein, meanwhile, wanted to know if Todd was disappointed in Fox, especially since the former NBC News anchor had stood up the right-wing channel in the past.
“I don’t want to namecall, but I’ve given up,” Todd replied. “I’ve handed my credibility to a handful of journalists over there who’ve never reciprocated when times were tough. When times were tough for them, I went out of my way to defend a couple of them.”
He went on to say that “we’ve seen the evolution of one of their larger news personalities go from trying really hard to follow in Brit Hume’s footsteps” to looking “more like Sean Hannity every day.” Notably, Baier took over for Hume as Fox News’ lead anchor of its flagship news program in 2009.
“And it’s a shame, you know, because I thought he really cared about that reputation and I think really actually cared about being a journalist first and wanting to sort of walk that line, understood what his audience was,” Todd continued. “Instead, he now just wants to have tee time with the president. I hope he enjoys it.”
Appearing at the Semafor Media Summit on Thursday, Baier was asked by Semafor co-founder Ben Smith about Todd’s remarks, which were unsubtly about Fox News’ chief political anchor.
“You straddle a very complicated line. You are like a central casting newsman at a network that is truly defined with these huge opinion shows, with these huge opinion personalities that intermittently burst into flames and ignite and go elsewhere. Tucker [Carlson] and Megyn [Kelly] are the two biggest podcasters in the world,” Smith noted.
“And you take a fair amount of heat for this. Chuck Todd, I think an ex-friend of yours, said: ‘I thought he really cared about being a journalist first and wanting to walk that line… and now he just wants a tee time with the president,’” he added.
“Yeah. That’s interesting,” Baier replied before going for the killshot. “I don‘t know what promoted Chuck to do that. I have an interview to do with the UK prime minister today. So, I don‘t know what he is doing.”
After the audience laughed at Baier’s clapback, the Fox star went on to defend both his personal record and that of his network.
“My focus is, what I said, covering the news,” he said. “If I have off-the-record conversations and moments with President Trump, I think that any journalist would want to get in his mind of what is next and things are going a million miles per hour. So just to have a perspective off the record, I don‘t think that’s true.”
Besides saying Fox News was “first” on a lot of significant news stories, such as former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, Baier also took shots at other news outlets for their criticism of the conservative cable giant.
“Covid, you go to the Wuhan lab, you go to all of these things that we were a conspiracy theory, and we were attacked in the media who covered media,” he declared, adding: “And you know, a year later, it turns out to be we were leading the way. So, over time, the audience has come to trust us. When we have big events, we are the most-watched. Breaking news, we are the most-watched.”
