READ: Mediaite’s Winners and Losers of the Week
Mediaite’s winner and losers of the week are sourced from our newsletter — Live From the Green Room — which you can sign up for here!
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, we run down the best — and worst — of the week.
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Fox News host Emily Compagno kicked off the Green Room this week with a win on Monday, thanks to her promotion to co-host of Outnumbered, the network’s 12 p.m. show. Sen. Josh Hawley, the deeply polarizing Republican from Missouri, landed in the loser column for complaining about being censored — on the front page of the New York Post.
On Tuesday, Rachel Maddow was Mediaite’s winner, thanks to a strong ratings performance that has become something of a trend for the MSNBC host. Brandon Straka, a pro-Trump activist who was previously banned from American Airlines for refusing to wear a mask, was charged for his role in the Capitol riot. He was our loser.
Amanda Gorman, the awe-inspiring poet laureate from the Biden-Harris inauguration won the day on Wednesday (catch her at the Super Bowl), while Matt Schlapp, the subject of an embarrassing report in Politico, earned loser.
Read Friday’s Winner and Loser in full below, and subscribe to Live From the Green Room here.
MEDIA WINNER: Chris Stirewalt
Former Fox News digital political director Chris Stirewalt is having a good week, which by itself is an accomplishment so soon after being publicly fired from the cable news network.
In his first media appearance since his termination, Stirewalt chatted with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes during the Thursday edition of All In.
Besides the schadenfreudelicious element of appearing on a rival network, Stirewalt was also given broad latitude to defend the work he and his fellow Decision Desk colleagues performed on Election Night, directly criticize the baseless claims of election fraud made by President Donald Trump, and even engaged in an extended discussion with Hayes about the pitfalls of clickbait media.
Stirewalt described how they called Arizona for President Joe Biden, and the angry backlash that surprised them a few days later, because they had “broken” Trump’s narrative that the election was stolen.
Hayes pressed him about the “mistruths” that Fox News had promulgated, and Stirewalt was clear that he had not done so himself.
“Well I am glad that you have been liberated from a place where people do lie,” Hayes said to conclude the interview, “and I wish you well genuinely in writing in places where you can do good work.”
MEDIA LOSER: The New York Post
This week, The New York Post was taught a painful and embarrassing lesson about the importance of fact-checking, when they excitedly published a story about a 22-year-old man who tweeted that he had taken out a second mortgage on his parents’ home to buy more GameStop and AMC stock.
The story, unsurprising to anyone who’s ever actually gotten a mortgage loan, was absolute garbage. A Twitter user named @JackoWest_3 completely made it up. His silly prank tweet got a giant spotlight when Post reporter Mary K. Jacob messaged him to ask about his motivation for taking such a “big risk” but failed to request even the most basic verification of his unbelievable story.
“JackoWest” not only claimed that he had taken out a mortgage on a home he does not own, but that he had obtained the loan “via a zoom call (without the camera on) with his hometown bank.”
Property laws vary from state to state, but nowhere in the U.S. can you legally take out a loan on property you do not own, and you definitely cannot take out such a loan over a phone call without a written document to confirm the agreement.
Jacob’s story was swiftly exposed as a fraud, the Post deleted it from their website, and Jacob protected her Twitter account.
Correction: A previous version of this story stated that Outnumbered aired on Fox News at 1 p.m. It actually airs at noon. Mediaite regrets the error.
