The Media Research Center’s parade of unusually personal attacks on Oliver Darcy continued with an April 7 post by Nicholas Fondacaro:
Olivers abound on Sunday when former CNN media beat writer Oliver Darcy took to his media-industry newsletter to puff up late night comedian John Oliver. Darcy praised the effort and research Oliver and his team of producers at Last Week Tonight put into each episode. But one massive recent development for Oliver was the unaddressed gorilla in the room: the defamation suit against him and the production company. A defamation suit that allegedly stemmed from poor research and the manipulation of audio.
[…]In the sub-headline, Darcy touted that Oliver was “not holding back in an increasingly hostile political climate.” Some of that hostility was apparently coming from Oliver himself.
Fondacaro was more focused on John Oliver than Oliver Darcy here. Tim Graham made up for that with an April 14 attack on Darcy:
Journalists who insist the conservatives don’t believe in facts are greeting the very fictional final season of The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu with the ridiculous rerun spin of “wow, this repressive religious dictatorship is so exactly like Trump’s America.”
Former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy – Mr. “Facts First” – used his Status newsletter to promote an interview with the series show-runners Eric Tuchman and Yahlin Chang to discuss “a world that, alarmingly, has striking similarities to the fictional Gilead.” What garbage.
Graham then whined that right-wing anti-abortion activism was criticized:
They often start with the repeal of Roe vs. Wade – but that happened because voters elected President Trump, and he nominated Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn nationwide abortion on demand. That original decision wasn’t any more democratic than its repeal. It was judicial activism, not legislation. But leftists think freedom starts with the freedom to kill the unborn.
Apparently, Darcy is not allowed to criticize right-wing anti-abortion extremists like Graham.
Chief anti-Darcy rager Curtis Houck — who has regularly labeled Darcy a “Benedict Arnold” because he escaped the right-wing media bubble to be a real journalist — served up more rage in a May 22 post:
Status newsletter writer and former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy showed Wednesday how hate rages through his veins and soul at conservatives and particularly at “right-wing media” because he argued this “irresponsible,” “dishonest machine” filled with “malicious” intent — which contain plenty of good and decent people — “do not deserve” credit for being out in front of legacy (liberal) media on Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.
The headline and subhead were cartoonishly filled with hate: “The Right’s Biden Revisionism; For years, right-wing media pushed a warped narrative of Joe Biden as a brain-dead puppet controlled by sinister, shadowy forces. Now they’re demanding vindication—but they do not deserve it.”
Speaking of cartoonish hate, Houck continued to rage at Darcy for pointing out how cynical right-wing attacks on Biden were:
Darcy then made excuses by whining “MAGA Media figures—particularly on Fox News—lobbed increasingly absurd claims about Biden’s mental faculties” and “painted him as a senile old man who didn’t know what day it was, who couldn’t walk unaided, and who spent his presidency dozing off[.]”
This went on with more excuses, all-but admitting the claims were right Biden “lacked the energy he once had” while raging we contemptible ilk were going off of vibes and weren’t real journalists in our analysis[.] […]
This went right into deep-seated hatred: “MAGA Media’s goal was never honest diagnosis. It was political demolition. They weaponized Biden’s verbal gaffes, his slower gait, and his lower-energy demeanor to manufacture the idea that he was mentally vacant. Never mind that Biden managed the job without…chaos and confusion[.]”
No word on what Oliver thought about, say, Afghanistan.
[…]After saying “their years of bad-faith character assassination” is not “noble,” Darcy concluded Biden wasn’t “perfect,” but he still “made decisions” despite being “under constant attack from a media machine” and thus “[n]o one owes that dishonest machine an apology.”
Houck didn’t bother to prove anything Darcy said to be wrong — he was angry that Darcy said it, demonstrating how hate rages through his veins and soul at non-conservatives and particularly at the “liberal media.”
As a final attempted insult to Darcy, Houck concluded “Go touch some grass, bro.” Speak for yourself, dude.
Houck ramped up his rage in a July 31 post, smearing Darcy as a “prick” because he documented how the Federal Communications Commission under Brendan Carr is running roughshod over non-right-wing media:
Writing Monday night for his site Status, liberal media authoritarian Oliver Darcy — who has called for conservative media to be abolished from cable providers — celebrated a letter from the Freedom of the Press Foundation demanding Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr be disbarred and investigated by the D.C. Court of Appeals for, well, existing and alleging he hates the First Amendment.
The subhead was a tongue bath: “The Freedom of the Press Foundation is turning the tables on Brendan Carr, filing a complaint to investigate and potentially disbar the FCC chairman over his moves to punish Donald Trump’s media critics.”
Darcy painted the head of a group supposedly built on freedom of expression and robust debate as some down-and-out underdog-turned hero:
[…]This [Seth] Stern fella added to Darcy that what supposedly set him over the edge was the FCC approval of the Skydance Media merger with Paramount, the parent company of CBS: “Trump’s shakedown of Paramount could not have worked without a credible threat that the administration would not approve Paramount’s merger with Skydance unless it paid up..It seems obvious to us that a licensed attorney should not be able to help his boss make a mockery of the legal system by laundering bribes through the courts without consequence.”
Darcy breathlessly quoted from the letter, including the eye-roll-inducing nonsense that Carr’s refusal to go-along and get-along with corporate liberals “brazenly violate legal and ethical standards that govern the practice of law and public officials, undermining the First Amendment, the FCC’s credibility and the laws he is trusted to administer” and marked an “abuse of his office.”
Again, Houck doesn’t actually factually counter anything Darcy says — he’s just mad it was said. And it can be said that Darcy was proven right a couple months later when Carr effectively threatened ABC into punishing Jimmy Kimmel for comments regarding Charlie Kirk (not that the MRC will admit that, of course).