Politico: Special Report “offers a straight-ahead reading of the day's headlines every night”

From the December 18 Politico article:

Fox News is having a banner year in the ratings, but critics say it's because the network has turned away from journalism and turned to advocacy, with its high-profile trio of conservative commentators: Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. The White House recently took on Fox News as well, saying the network was a “wing of the Republican Party.”

When Fox News takes on its critics -- and it does, defending its status as an objective news outlet -- the network points to anchors Shepard Smith and Baier, a former White House correspondent whose program offers a straight-ahead reading of the day's headlines every night.

Sandwiched between Beck at 5 p.m. and “The Fox Report With Shepard Smith” at 7 p.m., Baier's “Special Report” offers an in-depth look at political news designed to appeal to Fox News's viewership. Hume, who handpicked Baier as his successor, still regularly appears as a senior political analyst.

“Special Report” includes the Political Grapevine, a two-minute segment plugging political tidbits and Beltway gossip. The program is based on correspondent-driven live reports from Washington and ends with a roundtable discussion from a balanced panel of journalists. Baier is winning high ratings and high marks for his handling of the show.

But Special Report contains numerous instances of reporting that is not “straight-ahead”

Baier not only advances misinformation, he provides a platform for Fox News correspondents to do so as well. Among the recent examples of misinformation aired by Special Report documented by Media Matters for America:

• On October 19, Baier misleadingly cropped then-White House communications director Anita Dunn's remarks at a high school graduation ceremony to falsely claim that she said Mao Zedong was, in Baier's words, “one of her two favorite political philosophers.” In fact, Dunn actually said that Mao and Mother Teresa were “the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you're going to make choices.”

• On December 8, Baier cited a misleading Washington Times article to report that “five firms” for which White House Office for Health Reform director Nancy-Ann DeParle had previously worked “were accused of things such as overcharging Medicare and failing to warn patients of the dangers of their products,” omitting mitigating information undermining the claim. In fact, of the companies The Washington Times cited as having legal issues, two apparently do not involve formal allegations of wrongdoing and in one, all of the activities resulting in legal action occurred prior to DeParle's tenure with the company.

• On December 1, Baier reported on the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis of the Senate health care bill's effect on insurance premiums and stated that “depending on how you read” the report, insurance “premiums for many people will actually go up” under the bill. But CBO estimated that premiums would only increase for individuals purchasing insurance on their own -- only about 17 percent of the insurance market in 2016 -- and that affordability credits would substantially lower costs for many of those individuals, a majority of whom would receive those subsidies through the exchanges.

• On November 2, Baier reported solely on criticism of reported plans to allow Guantánamo Bay detainees access to H1N1 vaccines, with Baier adding, “Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are very unhappy that detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility will get the H1N1 vaccine before many Americans. ” Baier did not note that military personnel will be vaccinated before detainees, that vaccinating detainees can help protect military personnel and their families, or that conservatives have repeatedly in the past touted the health care benefits given to detainees in order to defend the controversial detention center.

• On November 20, Baier falsely claimed that recently released cervical cancer screening guidelines were promulgated by a “federal panel,” adding that those guidelines “open the door to this conversation about rationing.” In fact, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which announced those recommendations, is a private membership organization, not a “federal panel.”

• On December 8, correspondent James Rosen advanced the dubious claim that “climate-gate” revealed that “some leading proponents of global warming [...] destroyed” raw temperature data. In fact, according to the scientists, the raw data is still available at the meteorological services where they obtained it and Climate Research Unit director Phil Jones said the CRU simply did not keep copies for “less than 5 percent of its original station data” in its database because those “stations had several discontinuities or were affected by urbanization trends.”

• On November 19, correspondent Carl Cameron cited the CBO to claim that the Senate health care bill would increase federal health care spending over 10 years and that, in the decade after 2014, “the cost nearly triples to well over 2 trillion.” But Cameron ignored CBO's conclusions that the bill would reduce federal deficits in both of the next two decades and that in the second decade, the bill would not increase net federal health care spending.

• On November 10, Cameron provided a platform for “prominent Democratic centrist and former Louisiana senator” John Breaux to urge Democrats to embrace less comprehensive health care reform without informing viewers that Breaux is a lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).