Media Research Center writer Curtis Houck has a love-hate relationship with Oliver Darcy and his Status newsletter — he’s obsessed with trashing Darcy (“Benedict Arnold,” anyone?), but he clearly relies on what Status reports and trusts what it publishes. An example of the latter is an April 15 post in which he noted that “Mediaite told Status’s Oliver Darcy it had suspended founding editor Colby Hall ‘pending further investigation’ for ‘errors’ in the sites’s One Sheet newsletter.” Then again, it could be that Houck hates Mediaite more than Status; he wrote that “A frequent basher of our friend and conservative talk radio icon Mark Levin, Hall has been an occasional target at NewsBusters over the years.” He also has a meltdown whenever Darcy tries to cancel his Status subscription because of all the hostility Houck hurls at him.
An example of the former, meanwhile, is a May 13 post:
Status founder Oliver Darcy took to his newsletter Monday night with a predictable target in CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss with a predictable set of wingmen (and women) in anonymous sources inside the network. The topic? They threw a collective hissy fit over chief Washington correspondent and longtime political journalist Major Garrett scoring the 60 Minutes interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Of course, Darcy’s nearly 1,200-word airing of grievances barely touched on the substance of Garrett’s probing interview. Instead, it was all about process and a collective declaration that Weiss didn’t do things how it was supposed to be done, which is let the (elitist snobs) at 60 Minutes have full autonomy and send Lesley Stahl.
His headline and subhead reeked of bitterness: “The Major Trouble at ‘60′; Bari Weiss’ decision to hand another high-profile “60 Minutes” interview to Major Garrett—who is not a correspondent on the show—prompted backlash inside the newsmagazine, Status has learned.”
[…]From there, however, Darcy said “Status has learned that famed ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent Lesley Stahl had also been gunning for the interview but was upstaged by CBS News boss Bari Weiss, who booked Netanyahu herself and handed the interview to Garrett, who is notably not a ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent.”
This, he asserted, “sparked hostility and amplified the already strained relationship between Weiss and the reporting team at the iconic newsmagazine” as per “the accounts of five people familiar with the events that unfolded[.]”
Houck continued to complain:
In noting this was the second time Garrett created “intern frustruation” by securing a high-profile interview for 60 Minutes (with the other being Secretary of War Pete Hegseth), Darcy went low in dissing Garrett as though he’s some nobody: “While Garrett is a veteran newsman respected in Washington, his only dedicated platform at the network is on its little-watched streaming service.”
“According to people familiar with the matter, Stahl had already spent months attempting to secure an interview with Netanyahu for the program to no avail. When she and the other correspondents learned Netanyahu had agreed to a sit-down for the show, but that the assignment had instead been handed to Garrett, tensions quickly escalated,” Darcy complained, adding the 60 Minutes crew feel like Netanyahu went “around Stahal…and that Weiss had assisted him in doing so[.]”
Houck didn’t explain why a “60 Minutes” outsider like Garrett deserved the Netanyahu interview more than Stahl did, aside from an implied preference on Netanyahu’s part.
Two days later, Houck cranked out another Darcy hit job:
While Fox News has long been an almost singular focus of the so-called media reporting class, conservative stalker and Status founder Oliver Darcy seems to have decided in recent months to shift his weight to throwing daily Mean Girls hissy fits over CBS News and the existence of editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and Tony Dokoupil as CBS Evening News anchor. That was yet again on display Thursday night as he pilloried them over Dokoupil having to cover the U.S.-China summit in Beijing from Taipei, Taiwan, after failing to receive a visa.
Darcy called Dokoupil’s week “an embarrassing series of events for the Bari Weiss-led network,” which feels like the umpteenth time he’s written something emblematic of what Stephen L. Miller told us Thursday on the NewsBusters Podcast about Darcy and his crowd embodying the grade school-esque “cool kids table” mentality.
As usual, Darcy never offered anything in terms of substance — think rhetoric or story election — to criticize Dokoupil and boss Weiss. Rather, it’s entirely personality-based and vague claims they’re somehow hard right.
And Houck’s repeated Mean Girl hissy fits over Darcy are not personality-based? Please. — he sounds like he spends too much time hanging out at the right-wign cool kids table. He continued to whine:
Darcy shoe-horned this into a more traditional ratings piece, declaring the “embarrassing episode” be seen through the lens of “a brutal first five months for Dokoupil, who has struggled immensely in the ‘CBS Evening News’ chair” and new Nielsen data that the newscast has been under four million total viewers for “five consecutive weeks…with the week beginning May 4 averaging just 3.7 million viewers.”
He closed by repeating himself about Weiss supposedly Captain Queeg-levels of competence:
[…]For a dictatorial tattletale like Darcy, only viciously partisan and inflammatory hot takes about conservatives existing in polite society are the only way the news media should operate.
Yet Houck seems to implicitly trust Darcy’s reporting. Go figure.
In between, Tim Graham had on his podcast fellow right-wing media rcitic Stephen “Redsteeze” Miller, where they discuss, among other things, “Oliver Darcy’s farcy website waging war on Bari Weiss as she barely makes changes at CBS News.”