Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier — who is reportedly under consideration to take over CBS Evening News — spent part of Thursday afternoon praising CBS News’ rightward shift and his Trumpist colleague Sean Hannity’s coverage of “Russia, Russia, Russia,” panning mainstream reporters for purportedly demonstrating “Trump derangement syndrome” in an interview on Hannity’s radio show.

Oliver Darcy reported Thursday for his Status newsletter that Bari Weiss, the CBS News editor-in-chief recently installed to move the network to the right, “has spoken to associates about bringing Baier into the CBS News fold, potentially for the ‘CBS Evening News’ anchor chair.” Darcy stressed that Baier is only “one of several names that have been discussed internally” and that he is under contract at Fox through 2028 with a salary of $14 million.

But Darcy noted that “the fact that he has been considered signals where the network is headed under” the new ownership of David Ellison, the son of Trumpy billionaire and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who took over CBS parent company Paramount in July (after President Donald Trump leveraged regulatory power to extract millions of dollars). 

Ellison has since hired a Trump supporter and right-wing think-tanker with no apparent newsroom experience as CBS News’ ombudsman; installed Weiss, whose Free Press outlet fixates on left-wing excesses while ignoring Trumpian abuses of power in an apparent effort to convert centrists to MAGA supporters, as its editor-in-chief; and won praise from the president himself as “a great man” who is going to “do the right thing with” CBS.

Hannity and Baier discussed the changes at CBS News and the broader media landscape during an interview to promote Baier’s new book. Hannity began the conversation by saying, “I believe that legacy media is dead. I think it died in this election. I think that Donald Trump has forever tattooed the words ‘fake’ and ‘news’ into the forehead of CNN, MSDNC, and the three major networks, I think people are more skeptical than ever before.”

Hannity then asked Baier: “Do you have an assessment of where they've gone wrong? I thought it was interesting, Bari Weiss asking the 60 Minutes team, Why does the country think you're all biased? That's an interesting question because most people I know believe they're very biased.”

Baier responded by praising the Trump-directed strong-arming of CBS News currently underway — with an allusion to his own network’s old “fair and balanced” motto, nonetheless. “Yeah, and clearly the Paramount purchase is interested in finding more balance and an effort to get back to some semblance of coverage that's fair,” he said.

“Listen,” he continued. “We've talked about this, Sean, you and I, and, you know, I'm not where you are as far as giving up. I think that there are still some good reporters out there and some good folks, but I do think that President Trump, in the first term and the second term, broke the minds of some reporters that were normal, straight down the middle guys and women.” 

“And the emotion that came with their pushback became Trump derangement syndrome, and it showed in almost every story that they did, and so then we got years of Russia, Russia, Russia.” Baier added.

Baier went on to praise Hannity’s coverage of Trump’s ties to Russia and the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election that was the subject of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. 

“To your credit, you, you know, you really pushed back with substance, and were one of the leading people on, you know, pushing back on all the narratives,” Baier said of Hannity’s work. “Eventually, it all came in much like your election night predictions, came to be. And, you know, the coverage of that was not to be seen around the country.”

In fact, Hannity had described Mueller’s probe — which ultimately detailed Russia’s systematic and sophisticated campaign to help Trump win that election and led to the imprisonment of numerous Trump allies for an array of crimes — as a “soft coup,” as well as “the biggest abuse of power corruption case in American history” and “a direct threat to this American republic.” The Fox host’s commentary ultimately helped trigger a four-year Justice Department probe of the origins of the Mueller investigation which provided him with lots of material but garnered three indictments, two acquittals, and a guilty plea that was punished with probation.

Baier concluded by tooting his own horn.

“So I think people got fed up and looked at a lot of this and said, I'm sick of it,” he said. Baier said that on Special Report, “We're trying to do all sides, and we're trying to give it, you know, that people have a sense of what's happening in the U.S. and around the world with some analysis at the end.”

“It's a different animal, you know, than an opinion show, but, I think it's one of the only places left that is kinda trying to do it,” Baier concluded.

Hannity responded by praising his colleague's show, saying: “I'll be honest. I think it's it. I don't see it anywhere else. I just don't, which is a credit to you and Fox in my view.” 

It’s difficult to imagine anything more damning to one’s journalistic reputation than being touted by Hannity, the network’s chief MAGA propagandist who has demolished anything resembling ethical standards at Fox in service of Trump.

Baier gets undeserved praise as a “straight news” anchor because his show bears a surface-level resemblance to a traditional news program and he occasionally provides feisty interviews with Republicans. Special Report will often provide brief mentions of stories that are damaging to the Trump administration which the majority of the network completely ignores. 

But Baier is also the guy who produced a bombshell story in the waning days of the 2016 campaign that Hillary Clinton was on the verge of being indicted; urged network executives to stop Fox from calling states for Joe Biden to forestall viewer outrage after the 2020 election; got caught airing a deceptive clip during an interview with Kamala Harris before the 2024 vote; and reupped his network contract while many of his news-side colleagues left the network as it transformed into a Trumpist propaganda network. 

At Weiss’ new MAGA-friendly CBS News, those attributes appear to be features, not bugs.