Visitors to Fox News’ website on Wednesday were greeted by a banner promotional video featuring anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the moderators of the first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 cycle.
“Every four years, Americans take the first step in a long journey,” Baier says in the video. “To select not just the president, but the leader of the free world,” MacCallum adds, before the pair provide details about the debate.
“America is watching,” Baier says at the video’s end, repeating his network’s slogan.
So who are the two moderators who America will watch referee Republicans as they begin the journey of picking a candidate to make the leader of the free world?
“Bret and Martha are accomplished interviewers. They are accomplished broadcasters,” said former CNN host and media columnist Brian Stelter in an interview with Spectrum News on Wednesday. “Fox News is two things in one: a very big opinion network, and a relatively small news operation. Bret and Martha are part of that news operation. And tonight is their night to shine.”
Despite Baier and MacCallum’s hard news reputation, they are still Fox News anchors who host daily weekday shows covering news for a largely right-wing audience, Stelter points out.
“Fox News is conservative through and through, even on the programs that are considered newscasts,” Stelter, who authored one book on Fox News and is working on another, said. “But in a GOP primary debate, it makes perfect sense for the candidates to be questioned on Fox News.
“In other words, Fox’s conservative bent is precisely the reason why the Republican National Committee chooses Fox for this debate as well as the next one,” when Fox Business will host, he added.
In some ways, the divisions at Fox News are representative of the divisions in the Republican Party broadly, Stelter said. On one side, you have the pro-Trump right-wing offering grievances and conspiracies like the 2020 election fraud lie. On the other side, you have ideological conservatives grounded in some kind of shared reality with the rest of the political world.
“There's a version of that happening at Fox, which is the direction represented by Tucker Carlson, which in my view, was getting further and further away from reality, further from the real and more into conspiracy,” Stelter said. “And then there's the direction represented by Bret Baier, and Martha McCallum, which is small-c conservative, but reality based.”
Because of the political and stylistic differences Baier and McCallum have with some of their fellow Fox News hosts, viewers can expect more policy-based questions than those based in the “so-called ‘culture war’ stories about race, gender.”
“I think this debate is going to be about policy matters, at least to some degree. More about policy than personal preference,” Stelter predicted. “In other words, I think the Fox moderators want this to be more substantive than the usual fights in right wing media.”
Candidates will have 60 seconds per answer and 30 seconds for a rebuttal if they’re mentioned by one of their rivals. There will also be quicker, lightning round questions, Baier told a conservative radio show host on Tuesday.
The last time the Republican primary had debates was 2016 and Baier hosted three, including the first of the cycle. That debate was the highest-rated non-sports cable telecast in history at the time, scoring 24 million viewers. Tonight, Trump will be watching from home as a pretaped interview he did with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is posted to social media.
Even with Trump, Stelter doesn’t think Fox News would be able to bring anything close to that viewership with the cable-cutting and disillusionment with politics that has occurred in the ensuing years. Without Trump, the network would be lucky to clear five million viewers, he argued, though that would still be a “significant number.”
But viewers might be less important than the reputation boost Fox News is hoping for, Stelter said, noting debates are often money losers for networks. Fox News settled a $787.5 million lawsuit in April with Dominion Voting Systems, a voting machine company that alleged the outlet defamed them by spreading false claims about the 2020 presidential election.
“Fox is also coming off devastating months of press coverage about their complicity with the Big Lie,” Stelter said, referring to the lie that Trump won the 2020 election. “Dominion’s lawsuit revealed so many embarrassing details about what happened in 2020. So to have this debate, is a chance for Fox to show itself in a more positive light. And that's super valuable.”
Baier has been with Fox News since 1998, according to his official bio, and has hosted “Special Report with Bret Baier” since 2009, currently holding the 6 p.m. E.T. time slot. MacCallum joined the network in 2004 and has anchored programs since 2006, most recently “The Story with Martha MacCallum” in the 3 p.m. E.T. time-slot.
NOTE: Brian Stelter is married to Spectrum News NY1 anchor Jamie Stelter.