Topic: Media Research Center
Curtis Houck started winding down the Media Research Center's in hating White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in a Dec. 22 post covering two press briefings, beginning with touting Mrs. Peter Doocy (as Houck calls her on his Twitter account):
With Tuesday and Thursday serving as the final White House press briefings of 2023, we had everything from questions at the border — which was a focus of the year’s first briefing — to more pro-Hamas idiocy.
Starting with Thursday, the best exchange came when the Fox Business Network’s Hillary Vaughn battled the National Security Council’s John Kirby over the latest flare-up in the seemingly never-ending Biden border crisis.
Vaughn started with the simple question of whether President Biden had “seen photos and videos from the past week of the sea of people crossing into this country illegally” beyond being briefed.
When Kirby demurred, Vaughn called out the administration’s pro-illegal immigration policies, such as giving illegals nearly a decade to mill about the country before a judge will hear their asylum claims: “Some illegal border crossers are being given court dates in 2031. What are they supposed to do here for seven years?”
Kirby took a page from his far-more-inept colleague, Karine Jean-Pierre, by punting to Homeland Security since he’s “not in a position to — to talk about specific cases like that”.
Vaughn kept pressing, pointing out Biden seems to be creating this crisis “for the next president” and if he believes it’s a problem to allow people to put down roots here before presumably being deported if their asylum claim is denied.
[...]
In the seat usually occupied by Vaughn’s husband, Peter Doocy, their colleague Rich Edson also had a simple question Kirby answered with a whole lot of nothing: “How successful would you say the administration’s efforts to stem root flow, to get to the root causes of migration have been?”
Houck finished out the year with a few briefing-related summary items. The first, on Dec. 26, lashed out at journalists who didn't follow pro-Israel narratives:
For decades, the liberal media have always had a soft spot for Hamas. Heck, even the Associated Press’s Gaza bureau shared a Gaza City high-rise with the barbaric Islamists. In the days following Hamas’s animalistic reign of terror on October 7, some in the White House press corps pestered National Security Council’s John Kirby during briefings with Hamas talking points.
Kirby, while a longtime Democratic administration apparatchik, showed serious fortitude to not only push back on, but utterly demolish many of their galling takes while reminding them that Hamas’s inhumanity on October 7 started this war.
Houck left out the part where the AP said it did not know Hamas was in the building and that Israel refused to provide evidence that Hamas was there, which puts the lie to his "soft spot for Hamas" claim and making it seem he approves of the death of journalists who don't push his approved narratives. Furthe, Houck portrayed questions about Israel's actions or that showed concern about civilians in Gaza as being "for Hamas."
A Dec. 28 post attacked questions by "stooges" from "the left":
On Tuesday, we took a look back at six moments from the past year when the questions inside the White House’s Brady Press Briefing Room skewed in favor of Hamas and against Israel. This time, we’re going to serve up six more times journalists showed their far-left bona fides, except this one will be more of the traditional sense as this summary touches on gun control and race.
This list focused on questions asked by journalists, so we left this one out as an honorable mention as, on April 24, the entire press corps – left, right, and center – failed to bat an eye when Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed during government spending negotiations that Republicans purposefully wanted to “fill our cities with smog,” “give asthma to our children,” and let oil companies use chemicals that’d “melt bones.”
Houck's final piece was a Jan. 1 post in which he summarized "the 12 best moments – battles, beatdowns, and hardballs – from 2023, the first full year of the ever-inept Karine Jean-Pierre’s term at the podium." Unsurprisingly, most of those questions were from biased right-wing reporters, whom he refused to give an ideological tag as he did with the purportedly "far-left" reporters.
