Despite bothering to cover only two of five White House press briefings in August, the Media Reserarch Center’s Curtis Houck wants you to think White House press secretary is the lazy one in his writeup of the Sept. 3 briefing, which carried a gushy headline touting a “DOOZY from DOOCY”:
Tuesday marked the first White House press briefing in 21 days and, along with the fact that Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre still found a way to show up nearly an hour late (by starting a 2:30 p.m. briefing at 3:12 p.m.), Fox’s Peter Doocy returned with a stunning doozy by asking about President Biden attacking Israel and Vice President Kamala Harris code-switching between audiences.
Along with having a crutch in former DNC Chair and ex-Labor Secretary Tom Perez, there was plenty of other points to roll your eyes over softballs and tough questions from other usual suspects.
But it was Doocy Time that drew the eyeballs and looks of disgust from reporters around him. He led off with a simple question: “In the President’s public comments, why is he harder on Benjamin Netanyahu than he is on the terrorist leader of Hamas?”
Jean-Pierre insisted Biden “has been very, very clear about Hamas leaders and what they have done” and done so “multiple times”. Ignoring how Biden blamed Netanyahu for there not being a hostage deal, Jean-Pierre claimed “Hamas is responsible” for what’s happened over the last 10 months and Biden will continue to be “clear about that”.
This went right into Harris changing her dialect depending whom she’s speaking to, as we saw when contrasting her Labor Day speeches in Detroit and Pittsburgh: “Since when does the Vice President have what sounds like a Southern accent?”
Jean-Pierre was not amused, claiming she had “no idea what” he was “talking about”. Based on her tone of disgust, she, in fact, did as she called it “insane”[.] […]
When Doocy asked if this was “how she talks in meetings here”, a flustered Jean-Pierre twice said she was “moving on” and into the restful questions (starting with one about Ukraine) from Voice of America’s Anita Powell.
Houck didn’t mention that Fox News cut away from the briefing right after Doocy’s question, apparently satisfied that its employee had manufactured a soundbite it could replay the rest of the day. It’s almost as if that was planned in advance.
Houck’s writeup of the Sept. 9 briefing started this way:
Monday’s White House press briefing led off with national security spokesman and frequent Karine Jean-Pierre crutch John Kirby defending the Biden-Harris administration’s deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan in light of a House Foreign Affairs Committee report, arguing they’ve done plenty of soul-searching, but feel proud of what happened and want to move on.
Thankfully, a few reporters had some questions about that, including CBS’s Ed O’Keefe. Unfortunately, his bosses didn’t think they were that important as his exchange with Kirby and the wider topic were both ignored from Monday’s CBS Evening News and Tuesday’s CBS Mornings.
No mention of Fox News dumping the previous briefing after getting its Doocy soundbite. Instead, he fluffed Doocy’s colleague Jacqui Heinrich asking why Harris is “spending so much time trying to define Trump and link him to Project 2025 rather than define herself?”
When Jean-Pierre shrugged at these questions since she’s not on the Harris campaign, Heinrich replied she asked since “the campaign is not holding regular briefings” or “a Q&A forum like we have here and you’re the spokeswoman for the Biden-Harris administration.”
Heinrich’s last question was even more simple than the ones on Afghanistan: “Does President Biden define Vice President Harris as a progressive Democrat?”
Behold this world salad from Jean-Pierre as she avoided giving Harris any ideological label[.]
Says the guy who won’t give Doocy and Heinrich accurate ideological labels, even as he regularly labels no-right-wing reporters as “liberal.” He served up more hypocritical labeling (and no-labeling) in his writeup of the Sept. 12 briefing:
On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was lucky to have softballs from liberal journalists discounting the mass, unfettered immigration puts on small towns, schools, and social services like in Springfield, Ohio as, leaving those aside, she was hit with searing questions on the economy and government spending by Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich and Edward Lawrence.
Heinrich cited “a new analysis by the Republicans who are on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee” that found, in “seven battleground states….the average household is paying, for the same basket of goods and services on average, about $1,000 more per month compared to January 2021.”
She cited “pretty stark” examples in places like Arizona and Nevada skyrocketing to $1,200 a month to $1,075 in Georgia and then $1,017 in North Carolina before asking: “Has President Biden’s policies positioned the Vice President poorly in these states to win this election?”
Jean-Pierre insisted that’s not the case because “core inflation has come down…because of the work that [we’ve] been able to do” and “wages are rising faster than prices are, nearly 16 million jobs created” but “we do understand that there is more work to be done.”
She also tried to throw in the tiresome lines claiming the 2024 GOP wants cut entitlements, but Heinrich hit back by noting “no one is running on” that and “we went through all of that” before.
Houck refused to explain why he called out “liberal journalists” but wouldn’t label Heinrich and Lawrence as right-wing, even though they indisputably are.
Houck couldn’t be bothered to write about the briefing the next day — possibly so he didn’t have to write about another right-wing reporter, Newsmax’s James Rosen, rudely interrupting another reporter’s question and prompting Jean-PIerre to repsond, “Not everybody wants to hear the sound of your voice, sir.”