Fox News Slammed the 'Suckers' Story—at First

Jennifer Griffin's reporting provided a different take
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 5, 2020 11:30 AM CDT
How Fox News Ran the 'Suckers' and 'Losers' Story
A screen capture of Fox News reporting on the Atlantic story.   (YouTube/Fox News)

Fox News initially criticized a report that President Trump called America's war dead "suckers" and "losers"—but partly refuted that denial within an hour, the Huffington Post reports. On Friday afternoon, two days after the Atlantic published Trump's remarks, Fox News' national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin ran a series of tweets saying Trump had "disparaged veterans" on a 2018 trip to France and didn't want to drive to a cemetery outside Paris to honor America's fallen. She also quoted a former top Trump official who said the president had called the Vietnam War "a stupid war. Anyone who went was a sucker," and "he doesn't know why people join the military. He would muse, 'Why do they do it'?"

Fox News host Greg Gutfeld on The Five disparaged media claims that Griffin's reports amounted to a confirmation of the story, calling them "debunked," "outrageous," a "scam" and a "hoax." But the Wrap reports that within an hour of Gutfeld's remarks, Griffin repeated her findings on Fox. She said one of her sources called it "a character flaw of the President. He could not understand why someone would die for their country, not worth it." She added that the president "was not in a good mood" on the trip to mark the end of World War One because "French President Macron had said something that made him mad." Trump tweeted Friday that Griffin had failed to confirm the entire Atlantic story and "should be fired for this kind of reporting." (More Fox News stories.)

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