The Media Research Center’s war against Oliver Darcy continued in a Nov. 14 post by Curtis Houck, who rehashed his usual bag of cliches at him:
Writing Thursday night at his newsletter site Status, conservative media Benedict Arnold and former senior CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy threw a fit over the company now overseeing the Golden Globes – Jay Penske’s Penske Media Company (PMC) – allowing conservative and other non-liberal podcasters like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson to be eligible for a new category for best podcast.
Darcy has not only been paddling the struggle boat over that, but the prospect of said podcasters being allowed to indulge in “pricey packages to boost their Golden Globe prospects—an awards show he also owns.”
All this, Darcy insists, has “sent shockwaves through his newsrooms, Status has learned, reverberating across the various Hollywood trade publications that he owns and prompting internal concern that was communicated to senior editors.”
Earth to Darcy: Have you not heard of massive publicity campaigns movies and shows push out on TV, socials, and even in print newspapers like The New York Times for shows like The Oscars?
Houck’s post is headlined “Grow Up, Ollie!” but Houck is the one who clearly needs to grow up.
When none of those podcasts was nominated, Tim Graham complained about it, and Darcy, in a Dec. 10 post:
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Golden Globe Awards added a Best Podcast category for its awards show in January. They began from a short list of the top podcasts, about 25 programs, but that included shows the left hates, like Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and #1-rated podcaster Joe Rogan. Right-wingers never win awards!?
Over at his kvetchfest of a website Status, Oliver Darcy complained for weeks that the Globe pickers wanted to platform “toxic figures” “who spend their days radicalizing audiences and inflaming the culture wars.” Darcy wants conservatives to be removed from all platforms, including awards shows.
Maybe it’s time for Darcy to do a victory dance. The six nominees for that inaugural Best Podcast award are out, and none of these Darcy-inflaming shows made the cut. Instead, it’s mostly light celebrity fare: Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, Call Her Daddy, Good Hang with Amy Poehler, The Mel Robbins Podcast, SmartLess (with actors Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Poehler’s ex-husband Will Arnett).
Houck returned to whine in a Dec. 16 post:
In his Monday night newsletter, former conservative media Benedict Arnold and Status founder Oliver Darcy expressed horror that the great people at NewsNation would hire “MAGA Media type personality” Katie Pavlich away from the Fox News Channel (and Townhall) to host a weekday primetime show and argued it “makes little sense”…unless it was to explicitly curry favor with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for approval of a local TV merger?
That was the conspiracy theory Darcy spun to explain the machinations behind Pavlich being offered her own show and more money than FNC was offering to re-up as a contributor and fill-in host. In essence, Darcy argued Pavlich didn’t necessarily earn this position on merit but rather use her as a piece in “governmental chess.”
Darcy started with allegations of how the deal came to together and laid out the pros and cons for Pavlich to leave a place she had been with for over a dozen years to a newer and smaller (but growing) channel.
Houck waited until the 10th paragraph to reference the merger in question, that of NewsNation’s parent, Nexstar and fellow TV group Tegna. And he cimpletely censored the fact that NewsNation’s hiring of the right-wing Pavlich undermines his narrative that the channel is not right-wing and, in fact, is a ploy to get the merger approved. As a bonus, Houck used his headline to call Darcy a “doofus.”