The microphone remains on the tie. A producer begins the countdown to live, and at exactly 6 p.m., Baier looks up from his laptop for the first time since sitting down and says amiably into the camera: “Good evening, and welcome to Washington. I’m Bret Baier.”
In the first block of the show, he throws to a correspondent in Paris covering the riots there, then to the State Department, the White House, and Ithaca, New York, for a dispatch on the protests at Cornell University. In 10 minutes, Special Report has covered five stories. In a final segment, a panel featuring three national political reporters weighs in on the upcoming midterms. By the end, this precisely choreographed endeavor produces an hour of television that draws an average of more than 2.5 million viewers each night, which makes Special Report the most watched hard-news program in all of cable.
These days, Baier measures his success against that of the broadcast networks—CBS, ABC, NBC—which he beats in some key markets. But he remembers when his ambitions were considerably more modest. “I went around doing stories and I’d say I was with Fox, and they’d say, ‘Is that the Simpsons network?’” he says. “And so the prospect of us beating a big [broadcast] network that still has much further reach is really pretty amazing.”
Seventeen years and a few dollars later, Baier now divides his time between Washington, where he still spends three to four nights a week, and a large home he recently purchased in Palm Beach, a short drive from Mar-a-Lago. He sold his house in the capital, a mansion in leafy Foxhall inspired by a Loire Valley château, to Howard Lutnick, Trump’s billionaire commerce secretary. “He got a good deal,” Baier says. ($25 million, cash.)
Baier’s rise to television stardom began by violent chance. He was an industrious correspondent in Fox’s Atlanta bureau when the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and he was called to the network’s New York City headquarters to help cover the attack. “We started driving, and then the third plane hit the Pentagon,” he says. “They rerouted us.” He drove from Georgia to Arlington, Virginia. “I started doing live shots for Fox affiliates outside the burning Pentagon that night, and I never left.” He was soon named Fox’s Pentagon correspondent, traveling frequently to Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2009 he took over Special Report from his mentor, Brit Hume, who offered three simple pieces of advice to the young newsman: “The show is not about you, the show is not about you, and let the news drive the show.”
