Topic: Media Research Center
Nicholas Fondacaro has gotten away with lying on behalf of the Media Research Center for so long, NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck has apparently decided to give it a try. Houck ranted in a Nov. 30 post:
Between late Sunday and Monday morning, the liberal media showcased their latest double standard between Democratic and Republican administrations and a failure to grasp reality. This time, outlets hailed President-Elect Joe Biden’s hiring of the “first” all-female White House communications team that’s “breaking barriers” despite the fact that the Trump administration’s top communications officials are all women.
Currently, women hold the positions of White House communications director (Alyssa Farah), deputy White House communications director (Roma Daravi), deputy White House press secretary (Sarah Matthews), press secretary for the First Lady (Stephanie Grisham), press secretary for the Second Lady (Kara Brooks), vice presidential communications director (Katie Miller), and White House press secretary (Kayleigh McEnany).
[...]
These three networks weren’t alone as flacks from the Associated Press, The New York Times,The Washington Post, and the taxpayer-funded NPR and PBS also willfully shared this lie far and wide.
Actually, the lying flack here is Houck, as evidence by his linking to a tweet from Farah as evidence. He pulls a dishonest sleight-of-hand by deliberately not comparing apples to oranges, referencing Trump's "top communications officials," obscuring the fact that two deputy press secretaries in Trump's office, Judd Deere and Brian Morgenstern, are, um, men. Since the Biden deputy press secretaries will also be women, it's absolutely true that the White House comms team under Biden is the very first all-female team.
Houck's failure to grasp reality continued as he whined, "Not everyone willfully ignored this falsehood, but instead of correcting the record or offering fact-checks, many of these same actors chose to explain why this narrative wasn’t a lie and instead fully accurate." He then lashed out at one of his great personal enemies, CNN's Brian Stelter, for accurately pointing out that men work in the White House comms office.
Houck concluded by sneering, "Stelter’s incapable of feeling shame, so he won’t cop to this narrative being a case of jiggery pokery." Says the guy who's so incapable of feeling shame that he's lying to our faces -- and he'll never cop to it, because he knows his employer will let him get away with it just as Fondacaro has, even though such blatant lies damage what little reputation for accuracy the MRC has.
