Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin vs. Fox News: Four Times the Correspondent Set the Network’s Hosts Straight on Russia
Fox News’ actual news coverage of the Russian-authored chaos in Ukraine has been what one would expect from a reputable cable news station trying to provide viewers with with reliable information.
Anchored by solid reporting on the ground from Steve Harrigan and Trey Yingst in Kyiv, as well as Mike Tobin and Lucas Tomlinson in Lviv, the network has done right by its audience.
Similarly, Fox News National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin has been all but living at the Pentagon and has provided viewers with up-to-date official assessments on the state of play in eastern Europe. She has been a staple on virtually every Fox News show in recent weeks, which means her straight reporting style and dispassionate understanding of the dynamics of the situation have inevitably collided with the sometimes biased and wayward views of the network’s hosts.
Below are four such examples.
Feb. 18 – Jennifer Griffin vs. The Five
Less than a week before the invasion, The Five co-hosts Greg Gutfeld and Kennedy picked the wrong time to float conspiracy theories about Russia’s massive military buildup around Ukraine.
“There’s something else going on here that is – that feels very, very manufactured,” said Gutfeld. “And I don’t know what it is.”
“I know what it is,” interrupted Kennedy, who definitely did not know what it is. She then bizarrely stated that the Biden administration was overhyping Russia’s threat to Ukraine to distract from the Durham investigation. Like many conservatives – led by Fox News – she falsely claimed the probe showed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign had hacked and spied on Donald Trump.
“Jake Sullivan is the national security adviser,” she continued. “And he is in deep yogurt in the Durham probe, and he’s been the one saying, ‘We have so much intelligence an invasion is imminent.’ He said that last Friday. It’s the next Friday, here we are. I don’t think Putin is going to invade.”
Soon after, Griffin joined live from the Pentagon and set the record straight.
“First of all, I need to level set with the conversation I’ve just been listening to,” she began. “What we are witnessing right now is not something that’s changed in the last 24 hours. If you go back to notes that I’ve been sending out for the last two weeks, this is something we’ve been watching in terms of you–have commercial satellite imagery, you have the buildup of forces, the type of forces, the numbers of forces, things that we’ve been told in advance to look for in terms of some of the disinformation that is already starting to appear, the false flag operations in the Donbas region. All of that is ticking up.”
Griffin added, “I’ve heard comparisons to the Iraq war, and WMD, and how do we know? We’re seeing it with our own eyes.”
“If you can’t look at the kind of the Iskander missile battalions that are now in Belarus [and] 30,000 Russian troops there. Half of [Putin’s] air force has now been deployed toward Ukraine. I am told just moments ago from a senior defense official that 40% of his 190,000 troops who are on the border with Ukraine are now in attack positions. That is something we have been waiting for…. This is not some wag-the-dog situation.”
Feb. 21 – Jennifer Griffin vs. Sean Hannity
On Monday – two days before Russian invaded Ukraine – Hannity ripped into Biden as he has been doing every night since the start of his presidency. The topic du jour that evening was obviously Russia’s military presence along Ukraine’s border. Hannity stated that Biden is “making Russia, and the hostile regime of Russia, and hostile actor Putin rich again” because the U.S. is importing oil from Russia.
“Joe Biden cares more about AOC, her new green deal, climate change alarmism cult and now, he is totally checked out,” Hannity said, before welcoming Griffin to the show.
“Sean, how we got to this point is a long story and it predates the Biden administration,” Griffin told him. “It goes back and includes mistakes made by every U.S. president since the Soviet Union fell apart, which Putin has said was the worst geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. Putin has been laying the groundwork for this attempt to retake Ukraine for years.”
Feb. 24 – Jennifer Griffin vs. Steve Doocy
Hours after Russia’s invasion began, Doocy welcomed Griffin to Fox & Friends. He prefaced her appearance by stating, “Jennifer, we that know we haven’t seen the Pentagon do much because there are no troops involved.”
“But the sanctions have not worked,” he continued. “Are the people at the Pentagon frustrated that our U.S. response has not been different?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that Steve,” Griffin replied. “They knew that they had limited options going into this because Russia, of course, is a nuclear power. And NATO and the U.S. are not gonna go to war with Russia over Ukraine. Their goal right now is to contain this and keep this spilling spilling over into an Article 5 nation.”
She continued: “You talk about how the sanctions haven’t worked, I don’t know if that’s really – that we can say that yet. Overnight, the stock market in Russia fell by half – 50%. This is just the beginning of what is being described to us as a shock and awe, if you will, of rolling sanctions that have not even begun to be felt yet by Putin, by his oligarchs, by the cronies there. So the Pentagon, I would not expect to hear from them publicly because they do not want to be seen as being in war with Russia right now.”
Feb. 24 – Jennifer Griffin vs. Harris Faulkner
Not long after her appearance on Fox & Friends, Griffin appeared on The Faulkner Focus, where the eponymous host said at the end of an interview, “We’ve had [retired] general after [retired] general tell us that sanctions were not gonna work because they were already baked into the cake as assets were being put into place. So when you say we saw this coming, they saw this coming, I’m just wondering why that was still the only strategy to deployed.”
Faulkner then tried to bid Griffin adieu, when the correspondent interjected.
“Well, Harris let me, I need to follow up on that because what you are talking about, if it’s more than sanctions, you are talking about sending U.S. troops to Ukraine,” she said.
“No, no,” Faulkner interrupted.
“Did you hear General Pittard?” asked Faulkner, referring to an earlier guest. “We had some other options that we could have done around in our NATO countries. It was an interesting conversation. Look, we can Monday morning quarterback, but now it’s Thursday and trying to look forward. He said we can still do the things in terms of military bases permanently.”
Griffin replied, “And that’s what they’re discussing today at NATO headquarters. That’s what we heard from the secretary-general. That’s why the North Atlantic Council is meeting.”
She explained that sending troops into Ukraine would have given Putin “a pretext to invade.”
“If you had put those NATO troops into position before Putin crossed into Ukraine, you would have given him a pretext to go into Ukraine. This has been very calibrated because of the concern that Putin was looking for a pretext to go in,” she said.
“There were very limited options at this late stage in terms of the last six months of preventing Putin from this using this massive, massive military force that he arrayed on the borders with Ukraine.”
Watch above via Fox News.
