Media Research Center writer Curtis Houck squealed over Karoline Leavitt’s slavish devotion to her talking points as President Trump’s press secretary in her first White House briefing, and his fangirling continued over a Jan. 29 TV appearance:
For her first broadcast network interview since officially taking office as White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt ventured into the far-left yet superficial lair of ABC’s Good Morning America, but drew the easiest choice of co-host in former NFL player Michael Strahan as opposed to George Stephanopoulos, who served in her position during the Clinton administration.
It started off fairly innocent: “And we want to start with the administration’s offer to buy — what — a mass buyout to federal employees out there. How many do you hope will take it? And by what percentage does the President want to downsize the federal workforce?”
After she said this was done “to make our federal government more efficient and productive and it is a fact that only six percent of the federal workforce here in Washington, D.C. actually shows up to the office,” which “is completely unacceptable.”
[…]Side note: Leavitt should have asked Strahan if he was ever able to do his job as an NFL player from home and see what would have happened.
Leavitt’s claim about the number of federal employees who work at the office is wildly false — the number is actually 54 percent.
Houck gushed over the first right-wing interloper in the press room in his Jan. 31 post:
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt likely made more liberal media heads explode on Friday afternoon as, along with calling on our friends at the Daily Wire and receiving respectful yet tough questions from Fox’s Peter Doocy and Newsmax’s James Rosen, she called on one of the co-hosts from the Ruthless Podcast, a fine variety progrum.
Leavitt opened the Q&A portion of her second briefing on the job with the Ruthless as the recipients of the “new media” seat:
The misspelling of “program” is a quirk of the right-wing show, though Houck didn’t see fit to identify the show’s bias. Houck then moved to his longtime fluffing of his favorite biased Fox News reporter:
This went right into Doocy Time. While more than a few probably thought Fox’s Peter Doocy would just roll over and ask softballs to a Republican administration, they were proven wrong. Just like he did with Biden regime officials, Doocy asked brief but challenging and substantive questions, starting with this:
[…]Doocy slightly rephrased it for a follow-up: “Was the air traffic controller in the DCA tower on Wednesday night, hired or not fired at some point because of his or her race?”
Leavitt also doubled down, saying she wouldn’t “confirm those” names although Trump “has still rightfully pointed out that there has been problems with the aviation industry over the past several years, and this started under Barack Obama in 2014.”
Doocy’s final question concerned the helicopter: “And when the President says on Truth Social, ‘The Blackhawk helicopter was flying too high, by a lot. It was far above the 200 foot limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it,’ is he suggesting a helicopter malfunction or a crew error or a crew doing this intentionally?”
Leavitt replied that Trump was simply stating a point that’s out in the ether, but otherwise would “let [the NTSB] investigation play out.”
Reinforcing the incestuousness of right-wing media, Houck spent a Feb. 3 post touting how the Ruthless podcast guy appeared on Fox News:
Fresh off having been the recipient Friday afternoon of the White House press briefing’s seats for new media, Ruthless Podcast co-host John Ashbrook dished to new 4:00 p.m. Eastern Fox News Channel host Will Cain what it was like to share a room with many of the reporters he had engaged with for years on Capitol Hill, drawing “a lot of my eye rolls and a lot of smirks.”
For those that missed it, Friday’s briefing was a reinforcement that it would be a new era in the Brady Briefing Room with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt not only keeping her promise to call on reporters representing a wider swath of the American public, but make space for newer forms of media like podcasts[.]
Houck cheered more on-message ranting from Leavitt— and praise for right-wing members of the press poll staying on message for Leavitt’s benefit — in his review of the Feb. 5 briefing:
On Wednesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s third press briefing mostly centered around two wildly different issues of transgenderism and the future of the Gaza Strip (especially in light of President Trump’s Tuesday claim the U.S. would take it over). And, as she’s done, called on a wide swath of reporters from legacy liberal networks to our friends in conservative media.
The “new media” seat went to podcaster and former longtime ESPN anchor Sage Steele, who was on-hand for Trump’s signing of an executive order ensuring only women and girls can safely compete in sports without fear of having to face transgender individuals.
Steele’s question correctly noted the executive order could be undone at any time whereas something passed by Congress would have the weight of law:
[…]Fox’s Peter Doocy was next and was the only reporter to invoke the incendiary rhetoric from congressional Democrats on Tuesday against President Trump, Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Not surprisingly, Leavitt shredded them and cited the obvious about Musk and DOGE having been a campaign pledge[.]
Houck echoed Leavitt’s transgender obsession in noting that “our friend Mary Margaret Olohan at the Daily Wire tied the transgenderism executive order to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.”
In his review of the Feb. 12 briefing, Houck cheered Leavitt’s tirade against journalists who refused to be good little Trump-bots like she demanded:
Having decided in recent days to collectively settle on a new narrative of painting the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as a constitutional crisis and defend faceless, unelected bureaucrats as heroes, the liberal media Borg were handed a brutal reality check Wednesday with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made clear this disinformation campaign wouldn’t be tolerated.
Leavitt had this to say about the liberal media’s “fear-mongering” and claims the administration would ignore (far-left) federal judges yielding “radical injunctions” thwarting DOGE and ignoring the will of the people:
[…]Thankfully, the thin-skinned liberal media reporters largely behaved themselves when it came to this issue.
Um, who was being “thin-skinned” here? Not the reporters. Houck went back to gushing how “Our friend Mary Margaret Olohan at the Daily Wire asked Leavitt to elaborate on the administration’s view of judges standing in the way of Trump’s agenda.” He concluded by a even more far-right reporter:
The briefing concluded with Gateway Pundit’s Jordan Conradson, who started with a question that, if asked by a progressive, would have been seen as eyeroll-inducing. Instead, he seemed to have been wanting to make a point about the left’s unhinged nature, which Leavitt diagnosed as the liberal media trying to sow division inside the administration:
Houck didn’t mention that Gateway Pundit is a highly discredited far-right outlet who had recently settled a defamation lawsuit by two Georgia election workers — the same ones who ultimately also got a settlement from Rudy Giuliani — but not before it tried to file a sham bankruptcy in order to avoid paying them.