Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's defense of Donald Trump following the CNN town hall included taking shots at a CNN reporter the MRC obsessively hates. Nicholas Fondacaro started things in a May 13 post:
Following the airing of CNN’s town hall with former President Trump Wednesday evening, many bloviating pontificators in the liberal media registered their outrage at the network for daring to give the Republican candidate a platform. A surprising voice to register their disproval came from inside CNN’s house in the form of senior media reporter Oliver Darcy via the so-called “Reliable Sources” Newsletter. According to reporting from Puck News on Friday, CNN boss Chris Licht responded to Darcy’s insubordination by putting “the fear of God into him.”
With the dust still settling from the rowdy event, Darcy clutched his pearls into diamonds as he fired off the newsletter proclaiming this at the top: “It's hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening.”
He touted the performance of his colleague Kaitlan Collins by calling her “as tough and knowledgable [sic] of an interviewer as they come. She fact-checked Trump throughout the 70-minute town hall.”
[...]
Darcy even called Licht out by name. “CNN and new network boss Chris Licht are facing a fury of criticism — both internally and externally over the event,” he stated, airing their laundry and leaving it an open-ended question of how Licht would respond to criticism.
Well, according to former CNN media reporter Dylan Byers, Darcy would soon learn how Licht dealt with critics firsthand.
[...]
What’s obvious from Puck’s reporting was that the Jeff Zucker weed runs deep and it would require a lot of work from Licht to pluck it out root and branch.
Only an authoritarian-adjacent right-winger like Fondacaro would think that honest, factual reporting (he cited no inaccuracies in Darcy's work) should be treated as "insubordination."
The MRC's chief Darcy-hater, Curtis Houck -- who loves to smear Darcy as a "Benedict Arnold" because he escaped the right-wing media bubble -- doubled down in a May 15 post:
Two days after Puck's Dylan Byers reported that CNN’s Oliver Darcy was shaken by the proverbial call to the principal’s office for insubordination, Darcy defenders pushed back Sunday night and comically tried to downplay the notion that it was bad news for Darcy to have been called to CNN boss Chris Licht’s office to discuss his analysis trashing his own employer for hosting a town hall with former President Trump.
Darcy’s allies and Semafor may try to have you think otherwise, but other than being told you were being promoted, receiving an award, or discussing, say, a loss in the family, receiving a summons to the office of the president of your company with other executives is never a good sign.
Semafor’s Max Tani had the details in co-founder Ben Smith’s weekly media newsletter: “Two people with knowledge of the meeting told Semafor that Darcy was not pleased with the depiction of the meeting, which noted that Licht told Darcy that he was emotional and had ‘put the fear of God’ in the CNN media correspondent.”
Earth to Darcy: How does it feel to perhaps have received a taste of your own medicine? Not so fun having anonymous sources denounce you, is it?
Houck concluded by begging Licht to make an example of Darcy:
Tani did have a kicker in which he shared “Darcy has wondered to colleagues whether he should resign or if he will be fired.”
And there it is. If Darcy were to be fired, it’d be a strong signal to CNN employees, media watchers, and viewers that Licht is intent on materializing calls from his Warner Bros. Discovery bosses to haul CNN back to the center and away from obsessions with Fox News and anti-conservative venom.
Houck, of course, was silent about Fox News' obsession with CNN, and he did not demand that Fox News tone down its anti-liberal venom.
