A Fox News spokeswoman had assured us that Jesse Watters — a Fox correspondent and one half of the duo of reporters who got into a scuffle on Saturday night at an after-dinner party following the White House Correspondents’ dinner — would use Fox’s “O’Reilly Factor” as a platform to address the brawl. The other half was Huffington Post Washington bureau chief Ryan Grim.
So this is what the aftermath of fisticuffs between two tuxedo-clad journalists at a fancy Washington party looks like: Watters’ boss, host Bill O’Reilly, opened his show on Monday with a segment calling Grim a “far-left zealot” who had “hectored and provoked” his underling.
Reliable flamethrower O’Reilly brought up the long-ago incident that instigated the fight. Which happened in, um, 2009, guys. But, hey, it still seems fresh enough in these guys’ minds to spark an exchange of punches at a black-tie soiree and a cable news segment.
Watters, known as an “ambush journalist,” had ginned up an on-camera confrontation of writer Amanda Terkel, now a HuffPo colleague of Grim. Terkel felt harassed (and recapped the incident in a Monday HuffPo post, of course); O’Reilly, in his Monday show, painted himself as the innocent.
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At the Saturday party, Grim — in solidarity with his now-colleague Terkel — turned his camera-phone on Watters, who snatched the phone away. Grim went to retrieve it, and the fracas was on.
Share this articleShareAfter O’Reilly was done defending him, Watters got his on-air moment during his “Watters World” segment on the show. Of the scuffle, he downplayed it, calling it “small ball.”
“Things happened,” he said. “And I regret that it happened.”
So that’s as close to resolution as we’re going to get?
But O’Reilly, a true pro, pointed out that the bigger picture: “You got a lot of publicity out of it. ”
Watters’ response? “Yeah, I guess so.”
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