Fox News host Greg Gutfeld took some time on Tuesday’s broadcast of “The Five” to speak of Benjamin Hall, mentioning a recent dust-up the two had on air a week earlier about what Gutfeld had called “emotional” coverage of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Hall had rebuked Gutfeld on the air for suggesting that the media was driving an emotional response to the war.
“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?” Gutfeld asked.
Hall’s response: “It’s an absolute catastrophe and the people caught in the middle are the ones suffering. Don’t take it from my word take it from the word of some of those trying to flee …Speaking as someone on the ground, I want to say that this is not the media trying to drum up some emotional response.”
Gutfeld addressed the spat on Tuesday, saying that he and Hall had spoken about the conversation in the days the followed.
WATCH:
Here is Greg Gutfeld talking about Benjamin Hall today. Mentions that they spoke last week after their "little kerfuffle" and ends by calling Hall "a lovely guy." pic.twitter.com/VuTIBm7szd
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) March 15, 2022
“I won’t say what we talked about because frankly it is nobody’s business but he did say something that I agreed with 100%. And he said, Greg, ‘you can’t do my job, and I can’t do yours.’ And I said, ‘duh, my job is way easier,'” Gutfeld said, adding, “I do get death threats but they are usually from Dana, on pink stationery.”
“But we can afford to pontificate because we are here thousands of miles away. They can’t afford to pontificate at all because they are always in danger,” Gutfeld continued. “As Geraldo said, war is the worst thing you can imagine. That is what we do here. We imagine. But what Ben and his co-workers do, they don’t imagine it, they actually see it. Which is why when I am sitting here, for me, I must be as anti-war as possible until I can no longer be anti-war because it’s like those TV hosts that were telling you to stay home and definitely during COVID because they still worked, they still got their paychecks, they got the camera crew coming to their house. They were divorced from their consequences. That was the same thing here. It is easy to talk about war at home. As Geraldo said, it is not romantic.”
“But since I’m not going anywhere near the war I am sure as hell not going to tell a single person to go there and die in a foreign country. I learned that lesson with Iraq and I am never going to go through that again,” Gutfeld added.
Gutfeld went on to turn the conversation back to Hall, concluding, “Ben’s job is to go there and delineate the truth through imagery. It is harder to do now than ever given social media, the internet, the rise of disinformation. But if you are sitting here at this table, you must be a radical skeptic because you aren’t there, Ben is. And I hope to God he makes it through. It is a horrible thing that happened to him and he is — to sound British, he is a lovely guy.”
Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott released a memo early Wednesday morning stating that Hall, who was injured in a Monday attack that killed two colleagues, was “safe and out of Ukraine” and was “alert and in good spirits.”