‘I’m Here to Fact-Check Facts’: Fox’s Jennifer Griffin Delivers Candid Assessment of Her Role at Network After Multiple Corrections of Colleagues
Fox News National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin reflected on the media punditry surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including her role in fact-checking her colleagues.
Griffin spoke to Howard Kurtz on Sunday for MediaBuzz and broke down her work cutting through Russia’s misinformation and analyzing the U.S. response to the Ukraine situation. When Kurtz asked for Griffin’s response to critics who previously accused the media of overhyping Russia’s threat to Ukraine, she defended the initial media reporting as “pretty accurate.”
From a reporter’s position, I’ve gone back and looked at those notes, and I’ve been pretty amazed at how — other than one issue, I would say, the whole issue. They did expect [Vladimir Putin] to use a massive electronic warfare and cyber attack in the beginning to blind the country. That did not happen, but it is still within his arsenal, and the way it’s been explained to us is that by outing some of that intelligence, it maybe caused him to shift some of his plans.
Kurtz later asked Griffin if it was a “reasonable critique” to call out President Joe Biden for not sending U.S. troops to the Ukrainian border before the fighting started.
“I don’t think so,” Griffin answered. She explained that U.S. intelligence became aware of Russia’s possible invasion threat months ago, and “they began working behind the scenes to come up with a strategic plan that did not end up with NATO, the U.S. and Russia — all nuclear powers — in a war.”
“If you started to send troops prematurely to the border, that would have given Putin a pretext,” she said. “So this was a very careful chess game that we saw played out in real time.”
Turning to how Germany’s response to Russia, Griffin called this “the things that we were told for weeks by pundits on the air that Germany wouldn’t do, Germany has now done.”
“So a lot of the punditry has really been proven very wrong,” Griffin added, “I think the reporting and the reporters have done a really good job.”
Griffin’s comments come after multiple recent instances where she set Fox’s network hosts straight when their opinionated talking points have gone awry. Kurtz brought this up by invoking a Washington Post story about her, headlined “Jennifer Griffin keeps fact-checking her Fox News colleagues on Ukraine.
“I read that as you don’t wanna get drawn into opinion debates,” Kurtz said. “How do you see your role during this war?”
Griffin replied by saying, “My role is no different than it’s been since I joined Fox in 1996 in Moscow.”
I cover the news. I’ve been part of the news division since those beginning days. I’m here to fact-check facts, because I report on facts. And my job is to try and figure out the truth as best as I know it. I share those facts internally so that our network can be more accurate. That’s what I’ve always done. There’s nothing different than what I’ve been doing for the last 26 years working for Fox.
Watch above, via Fox News.
