Meet the panel!

Fred Barnes | Mort Kondracke | Mara Liasson

Fred Barnes
Fred Barnes joined the FOX team in 1996 as a political contributor and is co-host of The Beltway Boys.

In September 1995, after ten years as senior editor and White House correspondent for The New Republic, Barnes founded The Weekly Standard, along with William Kristol and John Podhoretz, and serves as its executive editor. From 1988 to 1998, he was a regular panelist on The McLaughlin Group public affairs television program.

Barnes is the host of two weekly radio shows, Issues in the News on Voice of America and What’s the Story, a syndicate show. He also appears as chief correspondent on the PBS series, National Desk.

Barnes is a graduate of the University of Virginia and was a Neiman Fellow at Harvard University.

Mort Kondracke
Morton Kondracke, joined the FOX team in October 1996 and became co-host of The Beltway Boys.

He served 16 years as a regular panelist on the NBC/PBS public affairs show, The McLaughlin Group, seen on over 350 stations nationwide.

Before becoming the executive editor and columnist of Roll Call, the Hill’s feisty independent newspaper, Kondracke served as executive editor and senior editor of The New Republic from 1977-1991. He was Washington bureau chief of Newsweek and was a regular panelist on This Week with David Brinkley, and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

Kondracke chronicled his wife Milly's struggle with Parkinson’s disease in his 2001 book entitled Saving Milly.

Kondracke graduated from Dartmouth College and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Mara Liasson
Mara Liasson joined FOX News in 1997 as a panelist on FOX News Sunday, FOX Broadcasting's Sunday morning public affairs show that airs nationwide on the FOX Broadcast Network.

Liasson joined NPR in 1985 as a general assignment reporter and newscaster and is currently its national political correspondent. Liasson's reports can be heard on the award winning newsmagazines All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

Liasson received a Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism and from September 1998 to June 1989 took a leave of absence to attend Columbia University in New York. Shortly thereafter, she returned to NPR as its congressional correspondent. During her tenure she has covered three presidential elections — in 1992, 1996 and 2000. Prior to her current assignment, Liasson was NPR's White House correspondent for all eight years of the Clinton administration. In 1991, Liasson spent three weeks in Amman, Jordan where she reported on the aftermath of the Gulf War for NPR.

Liasson is a graduate of Brown University.