The Media Research Center’s Curtis Houck covered only one White House press briefing during the month of July. Thus, we heard nothing from him about, say, press secretary Karoline Leavitt making a fool of herself by declaring that President Trump “deserves” the Nobel Peace Prize.
He did, however, run to the defense of his mancrush, Peter Doocy, in a July 10 post:
On Wednesday night, MSNBC’s The Last Word host Lawrence O’Donnell went low in blasting Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy as a “babbling” and “incompetent buffoon” lacking “a shred of embarrassment” but brimming with “revealed stupidity” and“white male privilege” but also used to be “the stupidest reporter in the White House press corps” until “the dregs of Trump-worshipping media” came along.
What prompted O’Donnell to hurl this venom Doocy’s way? It turns out Doocy asked about a Justice Department probe into former Deep State denizens John Brennan and James Comey instead of colluding with White House correspondents at CNN and The New York Times in grilling President Trump Wednesday about the status of arms shipments to Ukraine.
O’Donnell led into the string of insults by decrying the revelation that the Trump administration was looking into those who gave oxygen to the Trump-Russia collusion fable, insisting this was done by “a cesspool of pathological liars” to distract from those upset about there being no Jeffrey Epstein client list.
“[I]t was Fox’s White House reporter today who, operating as usual as an energetic collaborator in Donald Trump’s distraction games, did everything he could without a shred of embarrassment about his own revealed stupidity to help Donald Trump push his new distraction,” O’Donnell huffed.
[…]Someone show O’Donnell questions Doocy has asked Karoline Leavitt this year (such as ones written about here) and tell me if they’re softballs.
Houck, however, did not dispute that the question O’Donnell called out Doocy for asking was a softball — and he weirdly failed to cite as a non-softball by Doocy his query of Leavitt regarding attorney general Pam Bondi’s claim that she had Jeffrey Epstein’s client list on his desk, which occurred during thte July 7 briefing that Houck has apparently decided doesn’t exist.
Still, Houck whined that “O’Donnell cartoonishly claimed the Trump White House press corps have acted to assist, not challenge or berate, him,” concluding: “As the full-time beat writer for all White House press briefings since 2017, that’s a certifiable farce.” That would be the “full-time beat writer” whose wildly biased coverage of the briefings — heavy on trashing those who worked for President Biden and slobbering over those who worked for Trump — is the real “certifiable farce.”
The only Leavitt briefing Houck could be bothered to cover during the entire month of July was on July 17, and he was extremely happy that she stuck to approved right-wing talking points:
While many in the White House press corps used their time Thursday afternoon to show sudden concern about transparency in the Jeffrey Epstein case, there were a few others who asked real questions about socialist Zohran Mamdani, Christians abroad, hospitals ending transgender surgeries for minors, reopening Alcatraz and, most importantly for those of us at the Media Research Center, the rescissions package that would defund far-left PBS and National Public Radio (NPR) of $1 billion.
NPR and PBS first came up during Leavitt’s lengthy opening remarks:
[…]Our friend Reagan Reese at the Daily Caller cued up Leavitt part way through the briefing to respond to two wildly false claims, one from Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and one from NPR CEO Katherine Maher:
Houck continued to gush over right-wing reporters who also pushed the approved narrative:
A few questioners later and immediately following one from the Daily Signal’s Elizabeth Mitchell about whether President Trump would get involved in the New York City mayoral race, 2023 MRC Bulldog Award winner Mary Margaret Olohan of the Daily Wire wondered what the White House made of more and more hospitals complying with Trump administration demands to end life-altering gender surgeries for minors:
So interested was Houck in being a partisan cheerleader that he refused to note that during that same presser, Leavitt also talked about Trump’s bruised hand, was confronted about right-wing influencers denouncing Trump’s lack of action on Epstein, was asked whether Trump will pardon Ghislaine Maxwell, and refused to answer a question about Trump’s bizarre statements about the Unabomber.
Houck’s examination of Leavitt’s July 23 briefing was focused almost entirely on guest ranter Tulsi Gabbard:
With the liberal broadcast networks having ignored until Monday night the bombshell report from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and House Intelligence Committee about the Obama regime’s role in concocting the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, Gabbard made sure the liberal White House press corps heard the findings that then-President Obama and his intelligence chiefs created, contorted, and forwarded false claims about then-President-elect Trump.
Houck did note that “Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt buried them before Gabbard even took to the podium,” though he included only a video of it he originally posted to his personal Twitter/X account and couldn’t be bothered to transcribe it. As a result of Gabbard apparently hewing even more closely to right-wing talking points than Leavitt, Houck ignored that Leavitt refused to answer how former President Obama could possibly be prosecuted over the alleged Russia stuff given that he has immunity while whining that she was even asked about it.
Houck went on to ignore Leavitt’s July 31 briefing, during which were were treated to Leavitt insisting once again that Trump deserved a Nobel Peace Prize and heavy spin over Trump firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the offense of telling the truth about the job market and failing to make his jobs numbers look good.
You’d think that someone who claims to be “the full-time beat writer for all White House press briefings since 2017” would be interested in actually doing the job of covering those press briefings instead of cherry-picking only what fits his predetermined narrative.