Curtis Houck makes clear in his post on the June 3 White House press briefing that he wants these briefings to be used to attack non-right-wing media, not impart useful information to reporters:
During Tuesday afternoon’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt took the liberal media to task from start to finish on everything from the anti-Semitic terror attack in Boulder, Colorado to fighting fentanyl to Gaza to the National Weather Service. And, in between those, she faced plenty of good faith questions…and others not so much.
Leavitt tore into The Washington Post in her lengthy opening remarks, specifically nuking from orbit the Bezos paper for its “despicable” and “ridiculous” piece declaring it to be a true mystery as to why fentanyl seizures at the U.S.-Mexico border have plummeted[.] […]
NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell followed and she followed up on what seems to be a liberal media-wide push at the start of hurricane season to suggest the administration is woefully unprepared due to Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts to the workforce….planting the seed people might die due to inaccurate forecasts.
Asked specifically whether Trump is ready for hurricane season and if he’s had briefings, Leavitt wasn’t having this nonsense, at one point telling her should wouldn’t “engage in such fodder”:
[…]The liberal media said before and since President Trump has taken office that conservative media would be potted plants for the administration. While some have wasted their chance to ask questions of substance, others make it count with genuine questions about the administration making good on their promises.
By contrast, Houck lavished praise on right-wing reporters who stuck to their assigned Trump talking points:
Our friend Amanda Head was in the new media seat, representing the great people at Just the News and asked about vaccines and this on anti-Semitism:
[…]Here was Kelly Wright – a former Fox News anchor and now with CBN News and NTD News – wondering if the administration could do anything of substance to fight anti-Semitism[.]
Then, of course, it was Mancrush Time, since Peter Doocy also stuck to his assigned talking points:
Doocy Time finally arrived following Wright and started with the autopen saga:
[…]Doocy then challenged Leavitt on whether the administration looking into this is worth it: “Is there any concern that this President, who won the election on a promise to fix the economy and close the border, that focusing and scrutinizing these Biden pardons is looking into the past instead of forward?”
Leavitt replied in part that it’s not compared “to the amount of time this President has spent on securing the border, on fixing our economy,” and “solving the global conflicts abroad” while, at the same time, it matters since “Americans saw with their own eyes a mentally incompetent president and they want answers.”
Doocy used his final question to ask about the then-breaking news with Elon Musk’s tweet blasting Trump’s one Big, Beautiful Bill, but Leavitt brushed it aside as something they were well aware of in terms of Musk’s opposition.
Houck didn’t mention that the day before, Leavitt had played the both-sides card on the Russia-Ukraine war, or that during the briefing she had botched a simple question about elections in South Korea.
Houck praised more attacks on non-right-wing media from Leavitt in his writeup of the June 11 briefing:
Wednesday afternoon’s White House press briefing was a fun one as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wasn’t having it with liberal journalists at Agence France-Presse (AFP), The New York Times, NOTUS, and Reuters trying to trap the Trump administration with questions about President Trump’s ironclad commitment to restoring law and order in Los Angeles following riots last weekend.
Reuters’s Nandita Bose wondered aloud whether the President’s decision to send in the National Guard and Marines to the city of angels wasn’t to restore order, but a distraction from last week’s verbal tussle with Elon Musk:
[…]The clip most circulated moment on the interwebs after the briefing was this from NOTUS’s Jasmine Wright asking if Trump finds any kind of protest “acceptable.” Leavitt ripped this line of questioning, exclaiming “what a stupid question’ at the end of her answer:
Houck omitted the context that Trump made no distinction between violent and nonviolent protests at his military parade and did not say that nonviolent protesters would be protected. Instead, he sucked up more to right-wing reporters:
In today’s example of how many conservative reporters aren’t there to simply roll over and lob softballs, EWTN’s Owen Jensen brought up the plight of Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong media executive and wrongfully imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party:
[…]On a much more positive note, our friends at the Daily Signal were in the “new media” seat:
Houck didn’t explain how Jensen’s question was not a “softball” given that it fed into a Trump-friendly China-bashing narrative.
Houck did not do a writeup of the June 19 briefing, which was probably good (if a little lazy) for him since the right-wing reporter du jour was from the discredited Gateway Pundit, who asked Leavitt if Trump is listening to “RINO warmongerer” Lindsey Graham.