Biden Spox John Kirby Pens Emotional Tribute to Fox’s Jennifer Griffin for Prestigious Award Ceremony
National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications and former Pentagon press secretary John Kirby penned an emotional tribute to Fox News chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin.
Griffin received a Freedom of the Media gold medal on Sunday from Transatlantic Leadership Network, a nonprofit “dedicated to strengthening and reorienting transatlantic relations to the rapidly changing dynamics of a globalizing world,” according to its website. The award comes following Griffin re-signing with Fox News to stay at the network.
Kirby was scheduled to introduce Griffin in person but had to go to London for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, which took place on Monday. Instead, senior State Department fellow Debra Cagan read a note from Kirby, who said that Griffin receiving the award “for public service certainly seems an appropriate way to recognize her talents and contributions.”
Kirby praised Griffin for bringing viewers unique reporting on historical events.
For more than 30 years, Jen has brought home to the American people and to people around the world, quite frankly, the conflicts, the controversies and the struggles that have defined the modern age. From her gritty reporting out of Gaza and the West Bank to downtown Baghdad and from Kabul to Kandahar and a thousand other places in between, Jen makes real that, which is hard to imagine; that makes accessible, which is hard to understand; and she makes human, which is hard to personalize.
She tells stories, the kind of stories you know, when you’re finished, when you’re finished watching that you needed to know. The kinds of stories that make you think a little bit differently and perhaps a little bit more deeply. And she is relentless in the pursuit of those stories. She once said, I don’t give up when covering the trials and tribulations of Afghan refugees. It’s the same thing she told me years ago when covering the surge in Iraq, airstrikes in Libya, the attack in Benghazi, the mission to take down [Osama] bin Laden, and the courage and scourge of women who have been victims of sexual assault in the military.
Kirby acknowledged that he and Griffin have “been on opposite sides of the notebook for many historic events” but said that Griffin’s “questions would be fair, and they would be tough for sure. But they were also exactly the right questions to be asking in the moment.”
Kirby also lauded Griffin’s persistence, for example, her surviving cancer. He also mentioned her determination to get her colleague Benjamin Hall out of Ukraine earlier this year when he was wounded while covering the war with Russia.
“Jen has this admirable but rather annoying way of getting people like me to say things we don’t want to say. That’s what it means to be a good reporter,” he said. “But the same doggedness also makes her a good person. I don’t give up, as she said again when she got the most dreadful of diagnosis.”
“Like a Pitbull and a Poodle was the way one person described how fearlessly she fought for Ben’s evacuation,” added Kirby.
Kirby remarked that there is no other reporter that is like Griffin.
“Is there another body of reporting out there that better demonstrates the public good that journalism can do?” he said. “I don’t know of it. And if there is another reporter who better typifies honesty, integrity, compassion and skill, I don’t know of her or him.”
Additionally, Kirby called on Griffin to take a break.
“Your colleagues respect you. And your competitors want you to take a vacation,” he said. “Frankly, so do us government people. Please. Dear God, take one. I’m begging you.”
Finally, Kirby said Griffin should “not to squander the opportunity tonight to be proud of yourself. I know I speak for a lot of other people in and out of government when I say that I certainly am.”
