The Media Research Center’s Curtis Houck had plenty of Doocy-fluffing to do in his writeup of the Jan. 23 White House press briefing, gushing over his biased hyping of right-wing talking points about the border:
During Tuesday’s White House press briefing, the Fox News Channel’s Peter Doocy reupped his focus from Monday on the never-ending border crisis except, this time, he did battle with the National Security Council’s John Kirby who, to his credit, has a grasp of the English language. This time, the two threw down over a Supreme Court ruling Monday afternoon that will allow Customs and Border Patrol to cut razor wire in the Rio Grande that doubles as the U.S./Mexico border.
Doocy came out swinging with this reality for anyone who’s been to or seen footage from the southern border: “Why are you guys making it easier for people to enter the country illegally?”
Kirby scoffed and played dumb: “I don’t believe we are. Why do you think we are?”
The Fox correspondent pointed to the reality that “you guys sued to cut razor wire that was put in place by Texas officials” and it was only then that Kirby dropped the act by saying the regime did it so “the Border Patrol, actually, do their jobs.”
Having been invited by Kirby to “keep going,” Doocy certainly did by asking if the White House thinks they “know better than the Border Patrol union,” whose “president is saying the Supreme Court’s decision is going to undoubtedly encourage more illegal immigration.”
Kirby insisted “[t]he Border Patrol needed access, and that’s why we sued to get rid of that razor wire, so that they could do their jobs” and, additionally, Republicans should comply with the White House funding requests for more Border Patrol agents (who, in reality, wouldn’t be used to secure the border, but process more illegals).
Doocy zoomed back out with another simple question: “Does razor wire work?”
“Does razor wire work for what? Does it work for the Border Patrol to allow them to have the access they need to be able to — to better process people that are trying to get across the border? I don’t think so, and that’s why we asked for it to be removed,” he replied.
For the Jan. 24 briefing, Houck whined that non-right-wing reporters were allowed to ask questions that didn’t advance right-wing narratives (which he dismissed as “softballs”):
Yes, Fox’s Peter Doocy got his turn during Wednesday’s White House press briefing and pressed Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on the Biden border crisis and a Tuesday remark seeming to embrace election denialism. But before that, the briefing featured pathetic softballs from the likes of NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell on abortion and theGrio’s April Ryan on — what else — race and black women.
O’Donnell had just asked Jean-Pierre about the pro-Palestinian protesters who repeatedly interrupted a Biden rally in Manassas, Virginia when she pivoted to abortion, which the rally was scheduled to have been the main focus.
Boasting of the regime’s “strong view…that reproductive rights, abortion rights are an essential in this campaign season,” O’Donnell invited Jean-Pierre to explain to her how Biden will “find ways to do more to personalize this story of how women are affected by it” such as “cit[ing] ways where women are not getting medical care.”
[…]A reporter in the Politico seat also had a question from the left, wondering if, in light of “recent…layoffs at the LA Times” and Time magazine, the administration would “support legislation…that would require social media platforms to pay news outlets for their content.”
Houck failed to identify Doocy as asking “questions from the right,” but he slobbered all over the guy just the same:
A little later, Doocy Time finally arrived: “There are about 800 gottaways at the border every day, 96,000 since October 1. Does President Biden want to locate these folks who have disappeared into this country to parts unknown?”.
Jean-Pierre claimed she hadn’t heard that number and asserted such cases were why Biden was “having these negotiations…with the Senate…because we want to deal with what’s going on at the border.”
A lot of nothing later, Doocy called out Biden for claiming during Tuesday’s rally that former Governor Terry McAuliffe (D-VA) was the real governor of Virginia, not Republican Glenn Youngkin.
Doocy asked if “election denying” was “a joke now,” but Jean-Pierre decided to briefly play dumb: “What do you mean? You have to say more than just to make a random statement.”
Houck gushed over Doocy some more for the Jan. 26 briefing:
Friday’s White House press briefing went for 86 minutes, but it had fireworks on everything from the border crisis to climate to the Israel-Hamas war. Most notably, Fox’s Peter Doocy was only one of two reporters to ask the National Security Council’s John Kirby over the bombshell that roughly a dozen United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) workers — the group responsible for U.N.-directed aid in Gaza — may have participated in Hamas’s October 7 terror attack on Israel.
A Biden potted plant, CNN’s Arlette Saenz was surprisingly the other reporter and went first with an open-ended request for comment. Doocy came along a few minutes later and called out Kirby for having said earlier this month (January 4, specifically) that “you can’t hold [UNRWA] accountable for the depredations of Hamas.”
Houck will never admit that Doocy is a Republican potted plant.
For the writeup of the Jan. 29 briefing, Houck lashed out at “liberal reporters” who didn’t toe the riht-wing line but praised “a rare few” who did, like Jacqui Heinrich and Philip Wegmann (who, of course, weren’t identified as right-wing reporters):
On Monday, the border crisis and Sunday’s Iranian proxy attack that killed three American soldiers dominated the White House press briefing and, amid over a dozen liberal reporters asking process questions on Iran and open-ended questions on the Senate border deal, there were a rare few who actually pressed the administration on their weakness in the Middle East and the border deal that has conservatives and the far-left incensed.
[…]As for Heinrich, she had a litany of questions, including this zinger about Biden having previously muttered “don’t” to encapsulate the U.S.’s message to Iran and their proxies using drones to attack our soldiers: “So if it’s clear obviously, that ‘don’t’ didn’t work, does the President have any regret over not pushing, punching back harder in any of the prior responses that he’s taken to these proxy attacks on U.S. forces?”
[…]Real Clear Politics’s Philip Wegmann was also locked and loaded with a simple yes or no question: “The terms of the Senate deal that are under discussion would give DHS expulsion authority if border encounters head an average of 4,000 a day over the course of a week. Does the President consider that threshold of daily encounters a crisis?”
“I’m not going to negotiate in public….You’re asking me about a specific provision that the — that you allege in the deal…We’re not going to negotiate here…what’s in and what’s not in this in this deal,” he replied.
In between all that, Tom Olohan spent a Jan. 25 post whining that a CNN interview with Jean-Pierre didn’t smear her the way Houck does:
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre fawned to a friendly face at CNN about President Biden’s “equity”-based approach to his inflation-rattled economy. Cue the canned laughter.
During a Jan. 25 interview on CNN This Morning, Jean-Pierre harped to CNN Anchor and former White House reporter Phil Mattingly that “[Biden] has put equity at the center of everything that he’s talked about when it comes to the economy.”
Mattingly, who referenced his past experience with Jean-Pierre at the White House, offered flattering economic analysis to help Jean-Pierre’s gaslighting along, before asking her to respond to a worn-out CNN propaganda line about a gap between how great the economy supposedly is and bad voter perceptions.
In effect, Mattingly tossed softball questions in the apparent hope that Jean-Pierre would eventually knock the Biden economic messaging out of the park. She failed, miserably.
The MRC thinks anyone who doesn’t repeat right-wing talking points during interviews “failed miserably.”