Once again, the Media Research Center’s Curtis Houck took the lazy approach to monitoring White House press briefings in August — even though there only five briefings that month, Houck could be bothered to write about only two of them, and he split the work on one of them with another MRC writer who obsessed over a single question. In writing about the Aug. 12 briefing, Gabriela Pariseau raged that a reporter pointed out Donald Trump’s history of lies and misinformation:
A Washington Post journalist had the gall to ask the Biden-Harris administration what it could do to block former President Donald Trump’s speech from being heard by the voting public.
Noting Trump’s scheduled interview with X owner Elon Musk Monday, Washington Post White House reporter Cleve Wootson whined that the former president might utter so-called “misinformation.” Seemingly oblivious to the First Amendment, which allows his occupation to exist, Wootson asked White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre “What role does the White House or the president have in sort of stopping that or stopping the spread of [misinformation] or sort of intervening in that?”
Wootson attempted to dress up his anti-free speech question by framing it as an all-American perspective. “I think that misinformation on Twitter is not just a campaign issue. It’s a — you know, it’s an America issue,” he claimed.
Jean-Pierre responded, noting that the White House has spoken about “misinformation” and the alleged responsibilities of social media companies to stop it “many times.” But fortunately, she had no information to share and claimed neither her team nor the president were tracking Trump’s interviews for alleged misinformation.
Pariseau didn’t explain why Trump should be allowed to lie and mislead without that misinformation being called out.
In his writeup of that same briefing, Houck rehashed that question while making sure to fawn over his favorite biased right-wing reporters:
It was textbook case of contrasts during Monday’s White House press briefing as, on the one hand, one of The Washington Post’s lead Kamala Harris bootlickers called for the federal government — the Biden-Harris regime — to directly interfere in the 2024 election and censor Donald Trump and X’s Elon Musk and a softball from USA Today about Biden being wistful ahead of the Democratic National Convention.
On the other, there were reporters like Fox’s Peter Doocy, Real Clear Politics’s Philip Wegmann, and Fox Business’s Edward Lawrence who pressed the ever-inept Karine Jean-Pierre on the border crisis, Vice President Kamala Harris’s role in the deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Harris stealing Trump’s policy idea on ending taxes on tips, respectively.
Starting with The Post, reporter Cleve T. Wootson Jr. had the gall to kvetch that Trump’s interview with X’s Musk was an example of how “misinformation on Twitter is not just a campaign issue,” but “I think that misinformation on Twitter is not just a campaign issue.”
He then actually wondered what the White House would do to thwart “the spread of that” or even “intervene”:
He too failed to explain why Trump’s lies should never be corrected. But back to his usual right-wing mancrushing:
Thankfully, a few reporters in the room actually still do their jobs on a consistent basis when a liberal administration is in power.
Doocy Time kicked off with a back-and-forth about whether President Biden is “mad” at former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for playing a lead role in shoving him out:
[…]Doocy then pivoted to a question that Jean-Pierre pretended to not understand, forcing him to restate it three times:
[H]ow long have you guys known that Vice President Harris does not think President Biden is doing a good job at the border?…Well, she’s now promising to hire thousands more border agents than there are bow under President Biden….How long have you guys known that Vice President Harris does not think that President Biden is effective with his border policy?Jean-Pierre bemoaned Doocy “making a huge jump” in “assuming” “something” that doesn’t exist.
“She has a campaign ad where she is saying they need more Border Patrol agents. If President Biden is doing such a good job, why do they need any more [agents],” he added.
Of course, she punted by blaming Republicans for not taking President Biden’s border deal.
Doocy also worked in a third topic. This time? The mysterious Las Vegas Police radio conversations on July 17 when Biden fell ill.
That last topic was a right-wing conspiracy theory; a hospital in Las Vegas was put on standby, but there was never any medical emergency. It says a lot about Doocy that he bought into a bogus partisan claim — and about Houck that he wouldn’t call Doocy out on it.
For his writeup of the Aug. 14 briefing, Houck did more Fox-fluffing and invoked an old enemy:
The liberal media can spin Wednesday’s inflation report however they want (and they have in some wild cases), but nothing changes the underlining facts how Americans continue to struggle. Even though one AP reporter eagerly wondered if “the inflation problem is solved”, Fox’s duo of Peter Doocy and Edward Lawrence showed up at that day’s White House press briefing to give both Karine Jean-Pierre and Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jared Bernstein hardballs.
And, as we saw with reporters from ABC and NBC, the liberal media can finally speak the truth about Hunter Biden’s life of ruin and the legal peril he faces now that his father Joe Biden is no longer running for reelection.
Later during Bernstein’s Q&A and minutes after a long-winded answer to CBS’s Weijia Jiang arguing President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been hard at work on prices (even though they’ve had almost four years to address it), Lawrence wondered why should anyone trust Biden and Harris to finish that job.
[…]Doocy spoke to Jean-Pierre about the economy through the lens of Harris’s campaign and Axios reporting she plans to separate herself from the administration bearing her name, specifically on Bidenomics:
Doocy then twice tried to have Jean-Pierre admit that, in his words, “if Bidenomics was more popular, President Biden would still be the candidate.”
Of course, she wouldn’t bite and instead invoked “MAGAnomics” and the false claims about “want[ing]” the country to suffer “supercharged inflation” and have increase “taxes on the middle class” and “cut Social Security”.
Doocy closed with the press access issue to Harris: “The Vice President’s team is not holding any press briefings. You are left to answer everything for her, even though you are not the Vice President’s press secretary. Is that getting old?”
As someone clearly checked out, Jean-Pierre insisted she speaks “for the Biden-Harris administration” and it’s been an “honor and privilege to stand before you to be able to do that job, and I will do it as long as — as long as I can — right — to the end of this term”.
Houck is not going to admit that the MRC has largely ignored Hunter Biden since his father dropped out of the presidential race because his prosecution was always political and Joe Biden’s withdrawal meant the MRC no longer had to feign concern about him — well, that and the lying informant (which resulted in the MRC correcting dozens of NewsBusters posts, something it still hasn’t disclose to its readers).