The US political journalist Ryan Grim broke the news of allegations against Brett Kavanaugh before his 2018 supreme court justice confirmation, and he was among the first to report on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s initial ascent to Congress.
Still, to some, he remains known as the guy who got into a fight at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner with Jesse Watters, who debuted Tuesday as host of the coveted 8pm Fox News slot made available by Tucker Carlson’s firing.
And Grim is OK with that, he said on Thursday, reiterating in an interview with the Guardian that the fisticuffs resulted from his standing up for a colleague whom Watters had previously targeted with an ambush-style, on-camera confrontation.
“He’s a classic bully,” Grim said when asked to reflect on the highly publicized scuffle that broke out when – while recording video on a cellphone – he approached Watters to ask about his treatment of Amanda Terkel. “He’s a ‘dish it and can’t take it’ type of bully.
“So I don’t mind at all.”
At least in some national media circles, Watters’s selection as Fox News’s heir to the primetime broadcasting window once helmed by Carlson provided the occasion to revisit the altercation with Grim.
The fight’s prelude dated back to 2009, when Terkel – in her role as then managing editor of ThinkProgress.org – authored a blog criticizing remarks that the star Fox News anchor at the time, Bill O’Reilly, had made about a young woman who was raped and murdered. O’Reilly had also just accepted an invitation to speak at a fundraiser for a rape survivors’ support group.
Soon, O’Reilly responded by sending Watters, who served as his producer and comedy-sidekick of sorts, to conduct an ambush interview of Terkel while she vacationed in Virginia. Terkel later asserted that she felt harassed, describing how Watters followed her down the street shouting questions and asking why she had inflicted “pain and suffering” on rape victims as well as their families.
Terkel and Grim were working together at HuffPost on the night of the White House dinner in 2016, which they and Watters attended. There, while filming on his cellphone, Grim asked Watters to apologize to Terkel over the episode in Virginia.
Watters said he wouldn’t apologize but would greet her if she was brought to him.
“She said some nasty shit, though,” Watters said on Grim’s video. “I had to call her out. I had to call her out.
“I ambushed her ‘cause O’Reilly told me to get her, ‘cause she said some really bad shit. I know you’re getting video of this. She denigrated some victims, so we had to call her out. That’s what we do.”
Grim mockingly replied: “That’s chivalrous of you. So in your chivalry … [you] went out to the middle of Virginia and cornered her.”
At that point, Watters struck an incredulous tone as he asked whether Grim was “videotaping” him and told him to go away. Watters then grabbed the phone and threw it, and suddenly “there were a lot of fists flying,” Grim recalled.
Bystanders separated the two tuxedo-clad men fairly quickly, but the fracas landed in the news after witnesses provided accounts to various outlets.
Grim recalled that Watters went for his phone when he realized he had admitted on the record that “he had chased Terkel all the way out into deep Virginia at the behest of Bill O’Reilly”.
“I think that’s the kind of admission that he is fine to make in private but didn’t realize he had accidentally made in public,” Grim said.
Grim added that one of the highlights of the fight’s aftermath saw Shepard Smith – then another star anchor on the Republican-friendly Fox News – reach out with an offer of an exclusive interview.
“I think that’s a signal that there are, or have been, elements even inside Fox that don’t approve of the direction that it was having,” Grim said.
Grim continued that he “kind of like[s]” Watters as the face of Fox’s primetime coverage, “because he’s such a frat boy”.
“It’s much harder for that wing of the Republican party to hide behind some salt-of-the-earth vision of itself when the face of it is, like, the lead crown in the frat.”
Fox News and Watters have been asked for comment. Neither immediately responded to Grim’s remarks.
Grim is now the Intercept’s Washington bureau chief.
Watters’s promotion at Fox came after the network struck a $787.5m settlement agreement with Dominion Voting Systems to end a defamation suit over the broadcast of Donald Trump’s lies about electoral fraud causing the former president’s defeat in the 2020 election.
Fox has said the firing of Carlson, which opened the door for Watters’s primetime hosting gig, was unrelated to the settlement. Carlson has not commented.
Meanwhile, O’Reilly was forced to resign from Fox in 2017 after a series of settlements involving him or the company that stemmed from harassment charges against him.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
