Posted
August 23, 2023 at 8:48 PM EDT
Roy Rochlin
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Getty Images
Tonight’s debate will be moderated by two Fox News hosts: Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.
MacCallum is the anchor and executive editor of the weekday program The Story with Martha MacCallum. She has “played a role in every major political event since the 2004 presidential election,” according to her Fox News biography.
Most recently, she co-hosted Fox News’ 2022 midterm election coverage, including co-hosting a debate between Ohio Senate candidates J.D. Vance and Tim Ryan.
Baier, who joined the network as a reporter in 1998, is currently its chief political anchor and the anchor and executive editor of the weeknight Special Report with Bret Baier.
His Fox News bio says he’s similarly played a critical role in every major political event since joining the network, including co-anchoring 2022 midterm election coverage and moderating a debate between Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bernie Sanders.
Baier has conducted many of the network’s high-profile political interviews in recent years — including an especially contentious one with Trump in June, where the anchor pressed the former president about his handling of classified documents after leaving office.
Trump later slammed Baier and the network for how the interview was handled.
“Then you have a hostile network like Fox. When I did the interview with Bret, I thought it was fine,” he said. “I thought it was OK, but there was nothing friendly about it. You know, it was nasty.”
That interview is one of the reasons behind Trump’s growing rift with Fox, NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik says.
Baier said this week that he thought Trump’s plans to surrender to Georgia authorities on Thursday “calculated,” adding: “I think it is about sucking the oxygen out of the room for anybody who had a big night on Wednesday making the rounds on Thursday.”
Meanwhile, MacCallum told Fox News this week that her main goal for the debate is “to move this process forward in a way that people feel is edifying and that they are more interested in the morning after on Thursday.”
“Our job is to draw out of them in the most concise and challenging way how they would deal with the very serious issues that confront the country,” she added.
She said her strategy will involve asking the right questions to draw out the candidates’ visions for the future and listening closely to their answers, to make sure they’re not dodging the questions or veering off track.
Moderators must “keep it on track and hold people to the question and make sure that the viewers and the voters, who are the most important part of the evening, are actually getting an answer to the question,” MacCallum said.
