Mediaite’s Winner and Loser of the Day
THE DAILY NEWSLETTER – MONDAY, AUGUST 30, 2021
MEDIA WINNER: Jennifer Griffin
Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin has been covering Afghanistan for nearly thirty years, giving her much-needed perspective on a region of the world that might be the location of America’s longest war, but was hardly at the top of Americans’ minds until the past few weeks.
In addition to her reporting during various Fox News programs, Griffin has been a notable presence at recent Pentagon briefings, pressing the generals and other top officials to clarify their answers and respond to facts on the ground that she has learned from her sources.
Griffin has been outspoken about the human element as well, commenting that U.S. troops had been given “an impossible task” to oversee the evacuations as the Taliban took over, and holding the Biden administration accountable for failing to keep our promises to our Afghan allies, calling it “a national shame.”
“This has been one of the most challenging two weeks of reporting of my life,” Griffin told her Fox News colleague Howard Kurtz on Sunday. She’s successfully risen to that challenge.
MEDIA LOSER: Alex Berenson
Alex Berenson, memorably dubbed “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man,” has been permanently suspended from Twitter after yet another misleading anti-vaccine tweet.
A Twitter spokesperson confirmed that Berenson’s account was permanently suspended for “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules.”
Prior to his suspension, Berenson had nearly 350,000 Twitter followers and has made numerous guest appearances on conservative television and radio shows and conferences where he has made anti-mask, anti-vaccine comments that have been loudly and aggressively debunked by scientists. In addition to tweeting misinformation about Covid, he’s also tastelessly compared the lifesaving vaccines to to Auschwitz.
Multiple observers commented that Berenson had seemed to be lobbying for Twitter to suspend him, so he could be a “Big Tech” martyr, a popular conservative talking point. But as many other online gadflies — Milo Yiannopolis, Gateway Pundit, Jacob Wohl, Roger Stone and his minions — have found, losing the Twitter audience makes it a lot harder to cling to the spotlight.
