Fox News correspondent Benjamin Hall pushed back on Tuesday after Fox News host Greg Gutfeld accused news outlets of airing emotionally manipulative footage from Ukraine in an effort to advance a pro-war narrative.
“Speaking as someone on the ground, I want to say that this is not the media trying to drum up some emotional response,” Hall flatly stated, delivering a live report from Kyiv.
The remarks that touched off Hall’s response, meanwhile, took place moments earlier on Fox News’ highly rated talk show The Five. During a discussion on Russia targeting Ukrainian civilians in its unprovoked war on Ukraine, Gutfeld delivered a lengthy rant in which he questioned the news media’s coverage of the growing crisis.
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“I can feel the galvanizing force of these stories that kind of have sped up and are accumulating to create a narrative,” the Fox News host said. “And they only go in one direction. And I understand why they only go in one direction, because it’s the invaded who experience the atrocity, right? And that’s all we’re going to see.”
He added: “However, I can’t help but feel that this is a lot like other stories that we’ve gone through in the digital age in which an image is taken and then played over and over and over again to create some kind of emotional response out of you, because that makes a profit for news companies, right?”
After going off on a tangent about the media “pummelling” the public with images of police brutality, Gutfeld then continued to accuse the media of showing horrific images and footage of the Ukrainian war to serve a specific agenda.
“The bad part is there is this galvanizing kind of narrative that is there to create a reaction, and if somebody like me says, ‘hold on a second,’ and you try to counter the drumbeat, you’re seen as an inconsiderate cold-hearted pussy,” he exclaimed. “But if you amplify that story, why can’t up you be called pro-war? If you want to push this stuff, why can’t I call you pro-war?!”
Following a commercial break, the program turned to Hall to report on the latest developments in the nearly two-week war. And the network's State Department correspondent immediately took issue with Gutfeld’s remarks.
After saying the media is not “trying to drum up some emotional response,” Hall then noted that the footage that reporters on the scene are showing is “absolutely what’s happening” in the war-torn cities in Ukraine. Hall also noted that more than two million Ukrainians have fled the country.
“It’s an absolute catastrophe and the people caught in the middle are the ones suffering,” he continued. “Don’t take it from my word take it from the word of some of those trying to flee.”
After airing testimony from Ukrainian refugees, Hall added that it's a “tragic thing that is happening in this country” and “there is more video that we know what to do with” before telling his Fox News colleagues that “we will continue to cover it for you here on the ground but it is only set to get worse.”
At the end of the segment, Gutfeld addressed Hall’s criticism of his remarks, attempting a bit of sarcasm at first.
“What do you think, should I take Benjamin Hall’s cheap attack on me or be a good co-worker and let it slide?” Gutfeld jokingly asked, prompting co-host Dana Perino to jump in: “Remember what you said about our reporters last week?”
During a broadcast of The Five last week, Gutfeld dramatically revealed that his mother-in-law was stuck in Ukraine due to the violent war, and taking shelter in the border city of Lviv. At the time, he thanked his colleagues in the country for helping to get her to safety. Gutfeld later shared that she eventually made it over the border into Poland and had emotionally reunited with her daughter.
“I do want to point out that like our co-workers are unbelievably awesome [because of] the things that they have been doing for a grouchy, cynical bastard like myself,” Gutfeld said last week. “People have been helping me out, and somebody who has been obnoxious to them before and will probably be obnoxious to them after.”
Back on Tuesday’s show, Gutfeld quipped that he would “be the better man here” before defending his previous remarks.
“As I said before when this started, we want the quickest end possible. My concern has always been, when a narrative creates a story that bolsters one side, that is out of its element will you create more suffering,” he proclaimed. “That is the simple point I’m making is that could this have been prevented if there was a reality-based decision made and not the David and Goliath narrative which could prolong this and lead to more suffering and more humanitarian crisis.”
This isn’t the first time that one of Fox’s “hard news” reporters has rebuffed the network’s opinion hosts and analysts over their commentary on Ukraine. In fact, last month when Gutfeld and co-host Lisa ‘Kennedy’ Montgomery suggested the Ukraine crisis was “manufactured” in order to distract from Fox News’ overblown coverage of the latest John Durham report filing, an unamused Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin delivered a lengthy fact-check busting their preconceived narrative.
