Curtis Houck praised a non-right-wing reporter for asking right-wing-style questions at the May 22 White House press briefing:
With President Biden on the road Monday and Tuesday then a joint press conference Thursday with the Kenyan president, reporters jammed a lot of questions into Wednesday’s press briefing to the ever-inept Karine Jean-Pierre. Thankfully, NBC’s Peter Alexander woke up ready to do his job with probing questions to the press secretary, even if they’re on the same side of the aisle. The topic was even more surprising: student loan debt cancelations.
Alexander went about it like the man who usually sits next to him (but not on this day) in Fox’s Peter Doocy. Alexander first pointed out she “opened today’s briefing by talking about the latest student loan cancelations” and asked her to respond to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) calling it “a massive wealth transfer for Americans who did not attend college to those who did” and “a shameful play to buy more votes”.
[…]Alexander then unleashed his hardball:
[W]hat then is the White House’s message to those Americans who did not attend college for a variety of reasons, perhaps — including perhaps that they didn’t want to take on all the debt that went with it right now that they feel like, in some form, they are responsible for allowing those who did not to pay their fair share?Jean-Pierre insisted this was proof Biden is “building an economy that leaves no one behind”, which Alexander immediately interjected with a reality check: “Are those people being left behind? The ones who didn’t get support because they didn’t go to college?”
The press secretary wanted nothing to do with this and plowed ahead with her world divorced from reality except for those whom the Biden camp needs to secure reelection. To his credit, Alexander didn’t back down[.]
Houck offered no evidence that Jean-Pierre and Alexander are “on the same side of the aisle’; perhaps he assumes that any reporter who’s not a partisan right-winger like his mancrush Peter Doocy is a partisan Democrat. Though Doocy apparently wasn’t there, Houck made sure to give some love to his partisan Fox News colleagues:
A few minutes later, the Fox Business Network’s Grady Trimble returned to student loans, wondering why those who took out loans are, in the words of the undersecretary of education, “due forgiveness”.
“Everybody has a different story as to why they need student loans. Everybody has different reasoning as to why they want to go to college. I cannot speak for everyone,” Jean-Pierre mumbled, leading Trimble to ask it again.
Jean-Pierre doubled down about this “crushing financial burden” and insisted a “majority of Americans agree” with the regime on mass forgiveness. When Trimble pointed out a Fox “poll show[s] more than half disagree with using tax dollars” and then asked if inflation is made worse by these moves, Jean-Pierre stood pat.
Trimble’s Fox colleague Jacqui Heinrich had the Fox News seat and closed the briefing by stating the obvious that one could see Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) reintroducing of the failed Senate border bill as “a cynical attempt to try to show Americans that Democrats care about the border”.
Fortunately for Houck, he was able to serve up some mancrushing to the man himself (with help from another non-right-wing reporter) in his writeup of the May 28 briefing:
Tuesday marked the only scheduled White House press briefing of the week ahead of President Biden’s European trip to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, so plenty of anti-Israel questions flew in the wake of a deadly strike inside Rafa (including this from CBS’s Ed O’Keefe). Unfortunately, O’Keefe and Fox’s Peter Doocy were the only reporters in the nearly 25 minutes (24:43) of Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre taking questions to invoke the upcoming Hunter Biden trial.
O’Keefe went first after he had Jean-Pierre confirm Tuesday was the only formal briefing: “[G]iven something that’s scheduled to begin on Monday, I’m curious, how does the President plan to monitor the federal trial of his son, which is set to begin on Monday?”
[…]A few minutes later Doocy drilled down on the trial with a curious visit the President made over the weekend: “[W]hy did President Biden have a private meeting with a witness who plans to testify in court against his son?”
Asked to “say more”, Doocy replied he brought this up because “Hallie Biden is a key government witness who allegedly disposed of a gun that Hunter is accused of buying illegally” and “President Biden was at her house this week.”
Jean-Pierre feigned outrage at Doocy’s supposed insensitivity because this visit was only to mark the ninth anniversary of the President’s son Beau’s passing and Hallie is Beau’s widow (who also, for a time, was in a weird romantic fling with Hunter)[.] […]
Doocy stuck to the issue of Hunter Biden by mentioning the fact that former stripper and Hunter Biden ex-girlfriend Lunden Roberts will be releasing a book about her time with the now-First Family and her daughter Navy Joan Roberts, whom the President spent years denying she existed.
In turn, Doocy wondered whether the President has even Navy Joan, but Jean-Pierre ducked: “I don’t have anything to share.”
Prior to the Hunter questions, Doocy first had a blunt query: “Are you guys here at the White House in full-blown freak out mode?”
“What are you talking about? What are you talking about,” a flustered Jean-Pierre replied, to which Doocy explained was merely him quoting a Politico story about Biden’s bad polling causing a Democrat Party [sic] “freak out”[.]
Houck also whined that other non-right-wing reporters “had questions from the left on Vice President Kamala Harris and undermining the Supreme Court’s legitimacy.” But he also praised how “Fox News Radio’s Jared Halpern had an interesting exchange earlier with national security spokesman and frequent Jean-Pierre crutch John Kirby about the expensive but failing pier in Gaza constructed by the U.S. military.”