Fox News host Bret Baier admits that President Donald Trump’s decade-long “Fake News” crusade is to blame for plummeting trust in the mainstream media.
Baier, 54, said the president “broke the system” and decimated whatever trust remained in the media before he took over the Republican Party in 2016.
“Maybe that was part of his MO, what he wanted to do,” Baier told Politico’s Deep Dive podcast on Friday.
The host said that those in the media are partly to blame, too.
“Middle America didn’t trust what they were getting from a lot of media,” he said, which opened the door for Trump to capitalize on those emotions.
The attacks have had a notable impact. A Gallup poll released just before the 2024 election found that only around 30 percent of Americans have a “great deal” of trust in the media to report fairly and accurately. That figure was 72 percent in 1976, by comparison, and was at 40 percent in 2015, just before MAGA went mainstream.
Baier is his network’s chief political anchor and a longtime host on Special Report. He appears to be one of Trump’s favorite pundits and is an unabashed supporter of the president himself.
Still, Fox News is not always spared from the president’s wrath. Most recently, Trump attacked the network over unfavorable poll figures regarding his approval rating and Americans’ view of his tariffs. His adviser, Stephen Miller, outright called on Fox to fire its pollster. Trump said the same in a Truth Social tirade aboard Air Force One.
“FAKE POLLS FROM FAKE NEWS ORGANIZATIONS… should be investigated for ELECTION FRAUD,” he posted, upset that a Fox News poll assessed him a meagre 38 percent overall approval rating.
While that’s no “MSDNC” or “Fake News CNN,” as Trump has used to describe the left-leaning networks, it is the latest evidence that no news organization is safe from Trump’s attacks in MAGA 2.0.
The White House, despite Trump hiring a large number of former Fox News journalists to non-media roles in his administration, has said it is employing a messaging strategy to bypass the media entirely and reach the eyes and ears of Americans directly.
The post Fox Host Says ‘Fake News’ Trump to Blame for Media Distrust appeared first on The Daily Beast.
