Despite all its whining about him, the Media Research Center actually does trust Oliver Darcy’s reporting. One example of this is an April 15 post by Curtis Houck noting 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 that Hall had insisted ‘were purely a result of sloppiness in how he aggregated and categorized information, not from the issue of AI.’”
Mostly, though, Houck prefers to freak out about Darcy. He spent a March 4 post raging about Darcy’s reporting:
Talk about serious brain damage.
Writing Monday night at his newsletter site Status, former conservative reporter-turned-snake Oliver Darcy beclowned himself by tag-teaming with a cadre of anonymous sources inside his former employer CNN to claim our friend, talk radio host, MRC Bulldog Award winner, and senior political commentator Scott Jennings has become isolated in CNN with guests increasingly canceling on the network so as not have to associate with him.
His claim? He told readers that “CNN leadership being made aware of the concerns” he’s become for other commentators and “actual journalists” considering his weekend scoop on X that U.S. intelligence had predicted Iran would attack U.S. military targets.
Darcy whined in his piece “CNN’s Cosplaying Correspondent” that a quad-bylined, anonymously-sourced CNN.com story — featuring obsequious Deep State tool Natasha Bertrand — “pour[ed] cold water on a claim anonymously peddled by the Trump administration that had ricocheted across MAGA Media…that Iran was not planning to launch an unprovoked strike on U.S. forces in the Middle East.”
To put it simply, Deep State Natasha and her ilk are shilling for the now-barbequed Iranian regime and upset President Trump was the one who took Iran down more than a few pegs.
Darcy paints himself as a reporter, but he’s really a childish liberal stooge as he declared the late Saturday story “must have made for uncomfortable reading for CNN’s resident MAGA pundit, Scott Jennings”:
[…]Of course, what this is all about is the fact that Darcy and his lemmings seethe over the idea half the country is allowed to speak outside of conservative media.
Sounds like Houck is still bitter that Darcy escaped the right-wing media bubble — he has previously denounced Darcy as a “Benedict Arnold” for the move.
Houck whined further in a March 17 post:
Despite the plethora of evidence illustrating otherwise, entertainment writer Brian Lowry took to Oliver Darcy’s website Status — which has twice threatened to cancel my subscription — Monday night to complain Sunday’s Oscars had “los[t] its voice” and “collective nerve” by refusing to pay proper tribute to the late Rob Reiner by making the evening a courageous stand against President Trump, a man Hollywood and their ilk have falsely maligned as terrifying dictator and pedophile.
Lowry had his thumb on the scale from the headline and subhead: “The Oscar Loses Its Voice; The Academy Awards paid tribute to Rob Reiner, but at a politically fraught moment closed a cautious awards season by steering clear of the outspokenness and activism that defined the director’s career.”
He complained that, even though the Academy Awards “delivered a heartfelt tribute to Rob Reiner,” the show “conspicuously avoided the director’s other defining trait—his progressive politics and activism—with no one overtly saying the name “Trump” on the stage during the three and a half-hour telecast.”
Houck didn’t mention that Reiner was a longtime MRC target for not being a right-winger like him. He went on to complain that Darcy’s writer called out right-wing outrage-seekers like the MRC:
He huffed this year featured “traffic-seeking websites scrounging for headlines to find meaty movments, from O’Brien’s joke about the Epstein Files to presenter Jimmy Kimmel taking understated swipes at Trump and CBS, to presenter Javier Bardem saying, “No to war” and “Free Palestine” before getting down the business at hand.”
Comically, Lowry wants us to think those moments were not proof of any bent. Our Elise Ehrhard took on this year’s Oscars and found heapings of liberal quackery.
When Darcy criticized CBS News chief Bari Weiss and CBS Evening News host Tony Dokoupil — both of whom Houck loves to fluff — he merged both obsessions in a March 26 post:
Status founder and former CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy took to his newsletter site Tuesday night for a psychotic tut-tutting over the supposed grave of CBS News under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil, claiming Weiss’s “catastrophic,” “turbulent” tenure’s “five-alarm fire” has “destroyed” the “trust” “smart” viewers have in the brand in favor of acknowledging humanity in “the MAGA movement.”
With networks looking to promote their allies and spoil their opponents using first-quarter ratings, Darcy chose to take this ball and run with it, starting in the second sentence:
But through a series of actions over her turbulent six-month tenure as editor in chief, it appears the proud anti-woke warrior has instead helped destroy that trust—something that is now laid bare in the network’s rapidly shrinking ratings. Indeed, new ratings data obtained by Status isn’t just bad for Weiss. It is catastrophic.
This pompous prick then boasted Dokoupil’s poised to have the network’s “lowest-rated first quarter of the 21st century in both total viewers and the advertiser-coveted 25-54 demographic” at “4.3 million viewers” and “just 541,000 viewers” in the “35-54 audience.” Notice the accounting gimmick he deployed. Unless it was a typo, talk about some shuffling of the deck.
Houck smears Darcy as a “pompous prick,” and he insists Darcy, not he, is the “psychotic” one? Sheesh. But he wasn’t done, and he threw in even more whining about supposedly out-of-date criticism:
A chieftain of the Bluesky Brigade, Darcy tried to have it both ways by both mocking Dokoupil’s numbers and then arguing CBS is chasing away valuable viewers: “Of course, it is not hard to see why. Viewers are smart. They understand that under David Ellison’s ownershoip, and with Weiss at the helm, CBS News has charted a new course for the network–one that is friendlier to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement he leads.”
Yes, Oliver. The whole world thinks like you.
Like seemingly all of CBS News’s critics on the left (and right), none of them actually watch CBS News to begin with. Case in point: Darcy’s Dokoupil examples were all from the first two weeks and the 60 Minutes item was from January:
[…]He closed by openly rooting for an end to their tenures (and thus a pivot to a glorified MeidasTouch or TV version of The Atlantic), arguing they face “a brutal uphill battle” and continued “bleeding” since the world sees CBS as “no longer reflect[ing] their values or delivers the kind of aggressive journalism they expect[.]”
In 2026, the CBS Evening News has not been spared of incoming fire from NewsBusters as we’ve penned dozens of stories calling out liberal narratives. So, no matter how hard Darcy and his ilk insist its “MAGA-coded” TV, we’ll continue to call balls and strikes and praise them when they show a commitment to all Americans and slam them when they fall short.
We’ll see if this gets our Status account suspended.
Houck thinks the only reason CBS could “fall short” is if it fails to parrot his preferred right-wing narratives. Also: If the only reason Houck has a Status account is to hate-read it and spew hostile invective at Darcy — as seems to be the case — it seems that he has not exactly earned the right to have the account.