Mediaite’s Top Winners and Losers of the Week
Our newsletter, Live From the Green Room, regularly documents the triumphs and failures of the reporters, the pundits, the anchors, the hosts, the contributors, and even the politicians making waves at the intersection of politics and media.
Each day, our newsletter presents a winner and a loser. In this post, which we will publish every Friday, we run down the best — and worst — of the week.
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Fox News host Steve Doocy was the first Winner of the week on Monday after he shut down co-host Will Cain for pushing anti-mask rhetoric on Fox & Friends. On the same day, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo found herself on the Loser side after an unimpressive interview with President Donald Trump, which Mediaite’s Joe DePaolo argued was so bad it ended her days as a journalist.
John Poulos, the CEO of Dominion, was Tuesday’s Winner after he responded to false claims pushed by Trump’s legal team in a new Wall Street Journal op-ed. Another Fox Business personality found themselves on the Loser side this week, twice: Lou Dobbs, who has floated a series of batty conspiracy theories in support of President Donald Trump’s false claim the election was stolen from him. As of tonight, he shows no sign of reigning in the lunacy.
Mark Becker, a former Brown County (WI) supervisor, and former chairman of the Brown County Republican party, took the Winner spot on Wednesday for his article exposing a candid phone call with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).
“Senator Johnson knows that Joe Biden won a free and fair election,” Becker wrote. “He is refusing to admit it publicly and stoking conspiracies that undermine our democracy solely because it would be ‘political suicide’ to oppose Trump.”
Wednesday’s Loser went to MSNBC anchor Brian Williams after he attacked the Fox & Friends hosts for telling their viewers that they should wear masks and that masks work (which ultimately earned Doocy a spot at the Winner’s table).
“It’s important we never forget who the deniers were,” said Williams, despite the fact that Fox & Friends hosts like Doocy have long encouraged mask-wearing.
MSNBC’s Carole Lee was Thursday’s Winner for her long-form that delved into the bizarre and sordid details of Gen. Michael Flynn’s time in the Trump’s administration.
Read Friday’s Winner and Loser in full below, and subscribe to Live From the Green Room here.
MEDIA WINNER: Jake Tapper
CNN’s Jake Tapper got a big score this week: the first interview with President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, which on its own would put him in contention for today’s Media Winner of the Day.
How Tapper conducted that interview sealed the win for him.
He posed topics to both Biden and Harris that were of vital national importance, and asked tough questions that probably were not completely comfortable for them to answer, like Biden being asked to pledge that his family members will not conduct business that is a conflict of interest with the White House, questions about criticisms from progressive allies and those wanting more diversity on the Cabinet, and both of them being asked about navigating the sometimes competing interests between groups like the teachers unions and the scientific recommendations for the pandemic.
Journalism doesn’t require an interviewer to be on constant attack, targeting their subjects like a prosecutor conducting a brutal cross-examination, but after four years of obsequiously sycophantic interviews of President Donald Trump on certain rival networks, it is good to see powerful politicians challenged.
Tapper also got Biden to respond in detail to Trump’s refusal to concede, transition plans, and some of his strategies for fighting the pandemic.
There were also some lighthearted and personal moments, like hearing Biden explain how he hurt his foot playing with his dog and Harris talking about how her husband Doug Emhoff will be referred to as the “Second Gentleman” but she’s just going to call him “honey.”
It was a warm, genuine, and substantive discussion between a respected journalist and two people who will soon be having a lot of power over all of our lives, and definitely worth watching.
MEDIA LOSER: Greg Gutfeld
One of your humble newsletter correspondents likes to start the day with a triple shot of very strong Cuban espresso, but a recent rant has us wondering how much caffeine Greg Gutfeld is mainlining.
The Five co-host went on an unhinged tirade on Thursday, metaphorically ripping out his hair and rending his garments for the Fox News audience as he bemoaned the possibility of Democrats winning the Georgia Senate runoffs in January.
Gutfeld has always had a flair for the dramatic, and is admittedly entertaining to watch. But this histrionic schtick was a better fit for his former late night program, RedEye, than a 5 pm show on a news network. Screaming hyperbole about a pop culture topic is funny; aggressively inciting panic and division in your viewers that their fellow Americans are their enemies is not a laughing matter.
“If Democrats get control of the Senate under the current state of their party, it is over for this country,” Gutfeld declared theatrically. “It is the end of our Republic…If these people are in charge, it’s nice knowing you, America.”
Oh, come on!
As Mediaite’s Reed Richardson pointed out, if both Democrats win in Georgia, the Senate would be split 50-50, so Harris as vice president would be the tiebreaker vote. That razor-thin majority could not survive a single defection or absence. Moderate Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin are simply not going to sign on to defunding the police, shredding the constitution, or whatever the scare tactic in next week’s GOP ads might be.
Call us Pollyanna, but we just don’t believe that Senators of either party are plotting to destroy America. And after this hellscape of a year, we don’t find it helpful to try to convince Americans that their neighbors are plotting their demise.
Fox News has been getting ratings by running hourly episodes of George Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate, but we’re not going to applaud it here.
