Guests at the White House Correspondents Dinner witnessed a brawl between Fox News’ Jesse Watters and the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim.
In the early-morning hours of Sunday, a scuffle broke out between Fox News correspondent Jesse Watters and Ryan Grim, the Huffington Post’s Washington bureau chief. The fight — unusual among a tuxedo-clad crowd more used to venting their differences with Twitter snarks — briefly caused ripples in the party, where political staffers and journalists were grooving to tunes spun by DJ Biz Markie and noshing on mini servings of chili cheese fries.
Here’s how it went down, per several witness: Grim and Watters were among a group located in a heated tent just outside the main party area. The two apparently don’t have a personal relationship, but Grim realized who Watters was and recalled a beef he had with the “O’Reilly Factor” correspondent that dated back to 2009, when Watters, known as an “ambush journalist,” had engineered an on-camera confrontation of writer Amanda Terkel, now a HuffPo colleague of Grim. Terkel’s account of the incident was headlined “I Was Followed, Harassed, And Ambushed By Bill O’Reilly’s Producer.”
Grim decided to give Watters a taste of his own medicine, whipping out his camera phone and filming him. Watters didn’t take well to this, eventually snatching the phone away from Grim and putting it in his pocket. Grim set out to retrieve it, and a scuffle ensued. No cinematic sparring or broken beer bottles, witnesses said, but the two flailed around a bit, upending a table and bumping into several people.
“Punches were definitely thrown,” said one witness.
Looks like someone stepped inside Watters World and took some incoming!
******* “We cannot continue to allow ourselves to be influenced and molded by the political class and by the media. That is going to destroy us," he said, remarking that it's "kind of sad" that the press is the only business protected by the Constitution "because they were supposed to be the allies of the people." Dr. Ben Carson