Muir Impacts, Owens Bashes, Convoy Coming | Winners & Losers in Today’s Green Room

The annual George Polk Awards in Journalism is dedicated to recognizing outstanding reporting across all of media, focusing on “the intrepid, bold, and influential work of the reporters themselves, placing a premium on investigative work that is original, resourceful, and thought-provoking.”

Among this year’s honorees, ABC World News Tonight anchor David Muir, executive producer Almin Karamehmedovic, and producer Esther Castillejo received the 2021 Environmental Reporting award for their series “Madagascar: The Children of Climate Change.”

As the Foreign Press Correspondent’s association notes, the reporting “provoked a global outcry and raised concerns at the UN Global Summit on Climate in Scotland.”

In a memo to the news division on the prestigious award, ABC News President Kim Godwin wrote:

“David Muir and his small team worked to gain access to Madagascar in the middle of the pandemic to report on an untold emergency unfolding — what the United Nations has warned could be the first climate-change famine — where hundreds of thousands are on the edge of starvation and aid organizations such as the World Food Programme (WFP) are racing to get food and water to the region.”

The three honorees were on the ground in Madagascar “trying to convince the country to let the team in during the pandemic — showing their determination to keep trying until they got access to the region in dire need.”

The stunning response to their efforts resulted in some $3.5 million raised by viewers for the WFP, almost half within just 30 minutes of the report airing.

World News Tonight was “the only network newscast to broadcast from the Global Climate Summit in Glasgow where world leaders were meeting, airing their report on the crisis in Madagascar,” Godwin explains.

For the award and the unprecedented impact of their reporting, these honorees and ABC News get a big win.

Conservative commentator Candace Owens has made herself part of the Ukraine news for a second time in less than a week with her contention on Tuesday that the United States is to blame for Russia’s invasion.

“WE are at fault,” wrote Owens in a tweet that went viral in a very bad way.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s long-winded, ahistorical speech on Monday he blamed America for a laundry list of complaints before giving himself a reason to invade Ukraine. It echoed remarks during a staged meeting with the Russian Federation Security Council that featured dozens of sharp condemnations of the United States as puppet master and aggressor.

All that revisionist history and anti-American sentiment found a fan in the Daily Wire’s Owens.

“I suggest every American who wants to know what’s *actually* going on in Russia and Ukraine, read this transcript of Putin’s address,” said Owens in a quote retweet. “As I’ve said for month— NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward. WE are at fault.”

The link misidentified which Putin remarks were therein transcribed but Putin’s complaints about the United States were the central premise, and it was that which Owens highlighted for emphatic agreement.

The backlash was swift, harsh, and by no means limited to any single sector of the political spectrum.

Donald Trump has been praising Putin, and so have some other right wing talkers, even blaming Joe Biden for “provoking” Putin.

But Candace Owens took it to another level. Linking to a doctored transcript direct from the Kremlin, Owens drank in the anti-American propaganda and spit it back out on Twitter as a direct attack on her country, and then doubled and tripled down, including questioning the nation’s motive in past, unspecified conflicts.

It was ugly, ill-informed, gullible, rankly hypocritical, and her response to the fierce backlash reeked of desperation.