MRC’s Houck Can’t Stop Personally Attacking CNN Media Reporter

On his personal Twitter account, Media Research Center writer Curtis Houck regularly smears CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy (pictured) as a “Benedict Arnold” of conservative media. Houck finally took his war against Darcy to the MRC itself, in an Oct. 10 post that begins by smearing Darcy as a “hack” in the headline and then attacks him as a “conservative media reporter-turned-liberal charlatan.” Later, Houck further rants his irrational disgust and contempt for Darcy:

For those of us in conservative media, it’s another reminder of how a man who was a Red Alert 30 Under 30 recipient and worked at Campus Reform and The Blaze now wakes up everyday trying to ruin the lives of the same kinds of people who gave him his start in politics. 

All this, by the way, in a post complaining that Darcy reported on a battle between Joe Biden and the New York Times in which he had noted that “right-wing polemicist” Peter Schweitzer was “discredited” for pushing the bogus Hillary Clinton-Uranium One non-scandal. At no point does Houck offer any evidence to contradict Darcy here. 

Back to Houck’s whining: So being conservative is a suicide pact, and nobody in the movement is allowed to leave or even question it and anyone who does is a “Benedict Arnold” for committing the offense of escaping the right-wing media bubble? We had no idea. 

This kind of ultra-rigid thinking is all too common in the conservative movement and particularly at the MRC where, we assume, nobody is allowed to question the great Brent Bozell. (Example: After Matthew Sheffield, who co-created the NewsBusters blog for the MRC, left the organization and began to speak about how the MRC cares more about raising money and pushing an ideological anti-media narrative instead of actually trying to fix media to make it more conservative-friendly, Bozell denounced him as “a repugnant human being.”) 

Houck is simply following in Bozell’s footsteps by making the personal political; remember, he’s also the MRC’s basher-in-chief of CNN’s Jim Acosta. Either he hasn’t figured out that petty, juvenile insults of people he personally despises are not the same thing as substantive “media research” — or the MRC has indoctrinated him to believe that they are.