Cable news ratings; Jennifer Griffin clears up balloon confusion; Candace Owens' sexual innuendo threats

Fox News’s Senior National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin offered a comprehensive report as to why the Biden administration waited days to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon traversing the United States – and noted the measures the Pentagon took to “mitigate” any national security threats it posed.
Fox News anchor Gillian Turner introduced a segment on the balloon, asking for Griffin’s assessment as to why the administration waited nearly a week to shoot down the balloon, which traveled across U.S. airspace for days.
Griffin reported that she had just been on a press call with National Security adviser John Kirby, who said rescue divers have been able to recover some remnants of the balloon from surface waters, which were now heading to the FBI’s labs in Quantico for study.
Griffin went on to explain that it would have been illegal to shoot down the balloon near the Aleutians, referring to calls on the right that the balloon should have been shot down earlier.
She also reported that a “senior defense official” had told her that U.S. intelligence had been able to gather intelligence on the balloon while it floated across the country, while also raising “security protections, shields over any sensitive sites.”
“And we’ve just confirmed that U-2 spy planes were circling the balloon as it crossed across the continental U.S,” Griffin concluded.
Props to Griffin for the comprehensive and detailed report regarding a story where many viewers want additional transparency and clarity.

Writer and author Jesse Singal said that Candace Owens threatened to accuse him of sexual misconduct over a 2016 story that cast her as a conspiracy theorist.
Singal claimed on Twitter that after he penned a New York magazine piece about Owens in 2016, she reached out to him and his editor at the time, then-New York editor Adam Moss, to claim she did not “feel safe” and threatened him with baseless allegations of sexual misconduct.
In the email, Owens wrote Singal was “making me very uncomfortable, and I do not feel safe anymore.” She claimed other women had accused Singal of being a “predator” and suggested she had damaging information about his treatment of women.
At the time, Owens wasn’t the right-wing culture warrior she is today, a fresh persona that has brought her enormous success at the Daily Wire. During the Trump years she adapted her politics, earning frequent appearances on InfoWars and Fox News and eventually a hosting gig at Ben Shapiro’s growing conservative media empire.
Owens’s apparent tendency to try and punish critics through baseless innuendo did not stop in 2016. Amid the Daily Wire’s feud with right-wing YouTuber Stephen Crowder, Owens made vague allegations about Crowder that she declined to elaborate on.
Singal argued on Twitter, with regard to his case and the Crowder feud, that the threats are part of a pattern that continues to this day.
Threatening to accuse reporters of misconduct or implying sexual innuendos without any proof is a pretty bleak pattern.