The Media Research Center’s war on Oliver Darcy continued into this year with a Jan. 7 post by Jorge Bonilla condescendingly headlined “We Regret to Inform You That Oliver Darcy Has Melted Down Again”:
What, you may ask, has sent Oliver Darcy into hysterics again? The sanctimonious media scold is in full meltdown mode over the newly revamped CBS Evening News, publishing a hysterical review on his Status newsletter.
Let’s face it: the Evening News had sucked on skates well before Bari Weiss came aboard as Editor-in-Chief of CBS News. Norah O’Donnell couldn’t pull the newscast out of its perennial third place hole, and the product really went off a cliff when she was run off stage in favor of the John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois-led Evening News.
[…]What triggered Darcy’s latest outburst? This funny segment that closed out the newscast.
Bonilla insisted that the segment — which fawned over Marco Rubio holding numerous titles in the Trump administration — was merely a “goofy segment relative to the current news cycle.” Darcy commented: “Rubio is currently helping Trump pursue the fantastical goal of capturing Greenland, and only days earlier participated in the shock overthrow of Venezuela’s government. That the “Evening News” would cap its broadcast with a meme-driven homage to a central player in those events was, to put it mildly, an extraordinary editorial decision.” Which prompted Bonilla to whine:
One can almost hear the exaggerated Olbermannesque intonation when reading “extraordinary editorial decision.” And not to belabor a point, but that’s an interesting choice of words given CBS’s anti-Weissian history. God forbid a conservative Cabinet official have a moment in the zeitgeist. One does not recall similar huffery after the nation was forced to smell the media’s farts over the manufactured “Brat Summer,” but here we are.
Darcy would also complain about a report on Kristi Noem before getting to the crux of the matter: whining about the changes made at CBS News. The anonymous staffers buried the new newscast, pointed to Dokoupil’s one teleprompter flub as proof evident of a standards collapse, and emoted about working at the old CBS News.
And that’s really the purpose of this screed- whining about the way things were.
[…]If public confidence in the news media is at an all-time low, who’s to say that viewers won’t go for the vice versa?
This hysterical rant, both from Darcy and from his anonymous sources, is about little more than compelling CBS to hold the line and continue to push nuance-free Trump-deranged slop disguised as news. Viewers be damned.
Given that viewers haven’t exactly flocked to Dokoupil’s show and correctly see him as a shill for Trump and Bari Weiss, it’s far from clear that viewers actually want “the opposite” of what the biased Bonilla thinks they are currently getting. Of course, Bonilla thinks that any news operation that isn’t a Fox News clone falls short of his right-wing standards.
Tim Graham whined in his Jan. 30 column:
Conservatives could look at today’s incredibly fractured media environment and wonder why anyone would need to worry about the elite media, considering their trust numbers are in the basement (except among liberals) and their audiences keep eroding.
But just breathe the media air any day, and what we used to call the “dominant media” still dominates in setting the political agenda – in determining what everyone talks about. There was an old maxim that the media can’t tell you what to think, but they’ll tell you what to think about.
This again came to mind when MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace interviewed Oliver Darcy, whose current business is energetically trying to reinforce the ideological rigor of the leftist press. On her podcast The Best People, Wallace told Darcy, “I still think that story selection is the most power we have, what you decide to shine a light on, especially now in the second Trump term.”
Graham is merely mad that he and his fellow right-wingers lack the intellectual rigor to make its narrative the dominant one.
Joseph Vazquez tried to pile on in a Feb. 5 post:
How dare a U.S. senator defend American sovereignty over, er, American land! That about sums up former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy’s latest meltdown.
Darcy got his panties in a bunch over Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) ripping Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and Warner Bros. Discovery chief revenue officer Bruce Campbell during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust hearing for fumbling over their answers to his question of whether or not the U.S. as a country was built on stolen land.
Cruz was addressing spoiled brat pop star Billie Eilish’s anti-ICE comments at the Grammy Awards where she proclaimed, “No one is illegal on stolen land … And f*** ICE, that’s all I’m gonna say. Sorry!” Darcy was livid in his February 4 Status newsletter, decrying Cruz’s so-called “bizarre line of questioning” even though both Sarandos and Campbell are literally part of the entire Hollywood/lefty media entertainment cesspool.
“Cruz smugly declared that their non-answers spoke ‘volumes’ and showcased that Hollywood is rife with liberal executives,” Darcy whined. Uhm, where exactly is the lie Darcy? Netflix Executive Chairman Reed Hastings literally funneled $7 million into Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign! Is any more explicit evidence needed?
Vazquez failed to mention the $260 million Elon Musk spent to elect Donald Trump, which resulted in numerous lucrative government contracts being steered Musk’s way.
Vazquez went on to huff that Billie Eilish’s narrative that America was built on “stolen land” was “simplistic” (though not inaccurate) and that Cruz was correct to attack her over this. He concluded: “Take a seat, Darcy.” You first, dude.