The Media Research Center’s Curtis Houck has been spreading his love of biased Fox News reporter Peter Doocy — and his abject hatred of White House press secretary Jen Psaki — in NewsBusters blog posts for months. Now he’s doing it in person. He made an appearance on his boss Tim Graham’s Dec. 3 podcast to join him in fawning over Doocy some more.
Houck began by regurgitating a question Doocy wrote, then complained that Psaki “insisted that Doocy needs to put it in full context, that he’s somehow missing something. That’s one of her tropes that she uses. She sometimes plays dumb, like she didn’t hear what you asked her.” He then cheered a Biden mask gotcha that right-wingers love to do, which Graham cheered as an “optics question.” Graham then pretended Doocy’s biased questioning wasn’t biased: “These are good questions, and they’re holding him accountable, and this is the kind of question you would want them all to ask him. And I dont think that they come off as — they certainly come off as questions that are not intended to make Biden look good. I don’t think they’re necessarily seen as right-wing questions.”
Houck went on to tout a Doocy attack on Dr. Anthony Fauci, which he claimed started as “a technically benign question. You could argue he was setting a trap, we’ll just roll with it.” Graham sneered that the exchange showed “what we all know, and that is Dr. Fauci is a bureaucrat first and foremost,” adding that he “was looking forward to” Doocy’s attacks on Fauci. Houck then touted another biased gotcha question from Doocy to Psaki. He then bashed “liberal” reporters in the White House briefing room of pushing “narratives” — a word he doesn’t use in describing Doocy’s questions.
Disappointingly, Houck and Graham didn’t do much more beyond rehashing right-wing talking points. But their love of Doocy and hatred for Psaki remains all too clear.
Graham and Houck went on to other subjects, at one point declaring that people who are vaccinated but are overly careful about going out in public should be mocked as much as anti-vaxxers, adding that “the vaccinations should count for something.” Did Graham not notice that the website he’s the executive editor of (and where Houck is the managing editor) regularly pushes anti-vaxxer arguments?