“But Trump’s attack on Griffin was a bridge too far for her colleagues, seven of whom took to Twitter over the weekend to defend her.”
- “Jennifer Griffin is the kind of reporter we all strive to be like,” said national correspondent Bryan Llenas. “She’s courageous, smart, ethical, fair and a class act. She’s earned the trust of viewers throughout a distinguished career and is credibile.”
- “@JenGriffinFNC is a terrific reporter and a wonderful colleague,” State Department correspondent Rich Edson wrote.
- “Jennifer is a straight shooter and always pursues reporting with the goal of uncovering the truth,” former Fox News foreign correspondent Conor Powell, who worked with Griffin, told The Washington Post on Saturday. “Unlike a lot of ‘news people’ at Fox News, she never was worried about being on the wrong side of a story and angering the opinion shows.”
- “Jennifer Griffin is all you want in a journalist and a friend,” wrote senior field producer Yonat Friling. “She’s smart, courageous, she strives for professionalism and the truth. I am so proud to be her colleague.”
- ................Griffin, who joined Fox News in 1999, is one of the network’s most prized and distinguished journalists. In October 2019, after news anchor Shepard Smith, a frequent critic of the president, abruptly resigned, the network cited Griffin as evidence that a robust journalistic corps remained, despite external skepticism. “Tell that to Jennifer Griffin, whose report just went viral this week,” a spokesperson said at the time. “Or Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, Bill Hemmer, Martha MacCallum or Catherine Herridge, who have all done outstanding journalism.” (Herridge soon left the network for CBS News.)
- Anchor Neil Cavuto then endorsed her work. “Jennifer, you are a very good reporter,” he told her. Then, addressing his audience, he said, “She’s pretty scrupulous when it comes to making sure all the i’s are dotted, all the t’s are crossed.”
Unfortunately Trump maggots don't read The Washington Post and I doubt they follow the tweets from the real Fox News reporters.
I’d like to believe that the pessimism I expressed in yesterday’s diary might be mitigated by Trump’s attack on a Fox News correspondent and the way her colleagues have come to her defense. My pessimism was shared by the majority of the people who took my poll. We thought that this latest scandal would blow over and as usual Trump would succeed in weaseling out of any political consequences.
The question I am mulling over is whether Trump will be able to so publicly attack part of Fox News without throwing into question how he can wholeheartedly praise their opinion hosts.
Some Social Psychology
If enough Trump supporters who rely on Fox News for reporting on actual news on their local Fox station they will be getting contradictory messages if they also watch the opinion shows. This could lead to what is called cognitive dissonance in the field of psychology:
This occurs when a person holds contradictory beliefs, ideas, or and is typically experienced as psychological stress. When they participate in an action that goes against one or more of them. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein they try to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.
In A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957), Leon Festinger proposed that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency to function mentally in the real world. A person who experiences internal inconsistency tends to become psychologically uncomfortable and is motivated to reduce the cognitive dissonance. They tend to make changes to justify the stressful behavior, either by adding new parts to the cognition causing the psychological dissonance or by avoiding circumstances and contradictory information likely to increase the magnitude of the cognitive dissonance.
Coping with the nuances of contradictory ideas or experiences is mentally stressful. It requires energy and effort to sit with those seemingly opposite things that all seem true. Festinger argued that some people would inevitably resolve dissonance by blindly believing whatever they wanted to believe. Wikipedia
As applied to Fox News viewers hearing two blatantly contradictory stories about Trump these people are forced to either totally tune out the one that undermines what they want to believe or confront the fact that one is the truth and the other is a lie. If they admit to themselves that they were lied to on something major it can lead to the realization that they were conned. This is incredibly difficult to do, but it can happen. I have little doubt it will happen to some people, how many remains to be seen.
Back to Fox News
Fox News is basically two entities, straight news reporting and the highly partisan facts-be-damned ranting of the pro-Trump hosted shows. Can Fox News maintain this schism between the two from shattering? It is difficult to predict. There is just too much air time to fill with the overwrought pro-Trump blather of the sycophants. Besides there are some Fox viewers who actually want to hear about Covid-19, hurricanes and exploding buildings in Beirut.
Will the Murdochs realize that Trump is a lost cause if and when he loses the election and he no longer has a fanbase they can monetize, and decide they they should rein in lunatics or give them them the no doubt hefty severance guaranteed pay in their contracts? It would make sense for them to find some rational right-wing hosts modeling themselves along the lines of MSNBC so they can deal with the coming four, and hopefully eight or more years of Democratic control of the White House and Congress without a flamboyant and outrageous president to provide them with on air fireworks.
There’s one word that would terrify him more than being called more than anything else. When attached to him he’d be lucky to be the lead-in act at a Ted Nugent concert.
Related”
Sunday, Sep 6, 2020 · 2:08:34 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
Fox News host to Mnuchin: ‘Trump says he’s against cancel culture’ so why does he want our reporter fired? Video
“The president also says he’s against the cancel culture,” Baier pressed. “But do you think it’s right for him to call for the firing of a reporter who has unnamed sources who confirm parts of that story?”
“Bret, I really don’t know anything about that,” Mnuchin replied. “So, it’s just not something I can comment on.”
“OK, well, he’s tweeted about it,” Baier explained. “And he says he wants a reporter who happens to work here at Fox fired.”
“I’ve been busy on economic issues,” Mnuchin remarked. “On the military, I’ve always heard him to be 150% supportive. I’m just not aware of the issues that you’re talking about.”
Sunday, Sep 6, 2020 · 4:16:33 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
Fox News host Howard Kurtz on Sunday came to the defense of network correspondent Jennifer Griffin after President Donald Trump called for her to be fired because she confirmed details of a report claiming that he disparaged military veterans.
On his Fox News Sunday program, Kurtz hosted a panel discussion about the drawbacks of anonymous sources in response to The Atlantic‘s report on Trump’s alleged troubling view of soldiers and veterans. Kurtz noted that the report had been confirmed in part by Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin.
“President Trump has called for Jennifer Griffin to be fired,” Kurtz explained. “This is one of the fairest, most conscientious reporters on the planet, a former war correspondent, has done this throughout administrations. And she wasn’t offering opinion. She was doing her job.”
“It was fine for the president to attack the story,” he added. “But he really needs trying to stop trying to cancel journalists based on reporting he doesn’t like.”