Curtis Houck's White House Press Briefing Gushfest
The Media Research Center writer couldn't be happier that a fellow right-wing ideologue, Karoline Leavitt, was named President Trump's press secretary.
After four years of viciously attacking President Biden’s White House press secretaries Jen Psaki and (especially) Karine Jean-Pierre, the Media Research Center’s Curtis Houck got himself psyched for the MRC’s transition from Resistance Media to Trump Regime Media by praising Donald Trump’s pick for his press secretary in a Nov. 15 post:
Buckle up, White House press corps. Things are about to become way different from how things have been with Karine Jean-Pierre!
On Friday night, President-Elect Donald Trump named longtime aide and Trump 2024 campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt as the incoming White House press secretary and set to do battle with the liberal journalists in the Brady Briefing Room come January 20, 2025.
Trump praised her in a statement as having done “a phenomenal job as the National Press Secretary on my Historic Campaign.”
Adding she’s “smart, tough, and has proven to be a highly effective communicator,” Trump stated he has “the utmost confidence she will excel at the podium, and help deliver our message to the American People as we, Make America Great Again.”
Leavitt not only spoke on behalf of President Trump on conservative networks, but she also sparred with liberal journalists and anchors on networks such as CNN and the news streaming platforms for ABC and NBC.
Most infamously, Leavitt had a June 24 appearance on CNN This Morning cut short for the crime of upsetting host Kasie Hunt by referring to then-upcoming presidential debate co-moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper as liberal journalists.
The Briefing Room will be familiar territory for the 27-year-old Leavitt as she not only interned in the first Trump administration, but also served as an assistant White House press secretary under Trump’s fourth press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany.
Houck concluded by gushing:
So, having witnessed McEnany masterfully go into battle with the liberal media, Leavitt will undoubtedly be ready for the nonsense, constructive, and even, yes, good-faith questions from the press.
Exit question: Who will be Leavitt’s chief antagonist like CNN’s Jim Acosta was for McEnany and predecessors Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Sean Spicer?
We remember that Houck had quite the crush on McEnany, something we expect to reignite for Leavitt.
Houck spent his writeup of the Nov. 21 White House press briefing insisting that “Jean-Pierre embarrassed herself with meandering, stumbling answers about both her successor Karoline Leavitt in the second Trump administration and layoffs inside the Democratic Party”:
McClatchy’s Michael Wilner had a simple question about whether Jean-Pierre has spoken to Leavitt. Click the tweet to see the monstrosity of an answer that she managed to stretch a simple no into nearly 90 seconds of mumbling and stumbling:
[…]
theGrio’s April Ryan — who would be near the top of any hypothetical list of potential leading Leavitt adversaries — followed up on Leavitt by whining about how “there was a period of time where we had no press briefings” during the first Trump presidency (especially under the tenure of Biden-Harris supporter Stephanie Grisham, but we digress) and whether Jean-Pierre would be upset if things changed:
Houck failed to mention the fact that McEnany effectively abandoned her job by refusing to hold press briefings in the final two weeks of the first Trump administration so she wouldn’t have to talk about the Capitol riot. No wonder Houck wanted to insist that talk of previous Trump press secretaries was a “digression.” (Houck and his boss, Tim Graham, failed to ask McEnany about this in a softball 2022 interview with her.) And Houck insisting that Grisham was a “Biden-Harris supporter” when she was Trump’s press secretary is bizarre if not counterfactual; she stopped supporting Trump after the Capitol riot, a relevant thing to mention, and realized that Trump is a toxic person.
Meanwhile, the MRC has refused to tell its readers about some issues Leavitt has:
She was caught deleting social media posts praising then-Vice President Mike Pence and a Capitol Police officer after the Capitol riot.
She was a part of the small army of right-wing writers who was paid to write propaganda (well, more accurately, put her name on talking points others wrote) on behalf of shady Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, who was later convicted on federal fraud charges. (The MRC promoted another Guo propagandist, Matt Palumbo.)
Don’t expect Houck to remind you of any of this — his job is to help Leavitt spin a pro-Trump narrative, not to tell the truth. That’s how Trump Regime Media works.
First briefings
With her first briefing, however, Houck’s gushing went off the charts in a Jan. 28 post:
In the first the first White House press briefing of President Donald Trump’s second term, Press Secretary Karoline Levaitt made clear from the onset of the 46-minute-and-36-second briefing things would be different inside the Brady Briefing Room. Along with the opening and closing statements made famous by Kayleigh McEnany, Leavitt announced seats for new media and called on 21 different reporters from 20 outlets.
Overall, Leavitt was declarative in her answers, firm in her interactions with reporters (even though there were no scintillating duels), and substantive to the point it felt like a firehose. In other words, a total opposite of the bumbling, sometimes incoherent partisan mumbling by Karine Jean-Pierre.
She even conducted the briefing without a thick binder of notes (opting instead for only a few pieces of paper), nearly going full Amy Coney Barrett.
It started with a lengthy opening statement about cabinet nominees, a recap of President Trump’s first week in office, and graphic details about the criminal records of just a small sampling of illegal immigrants captured in Immigration Customs & Enforcement (ICE) raids:
The difference, which Houck failed to mention, is that Jean-Pierre was actually trying to impart useful information to journalists, while all her “substantive” and “declarative” statement in Houck’s eyes is simply about loudly and assertively lecturing and pushing narratives that Houck has no interest in fact-checking. Indeed, Houck was so dedicated to that narrative that he devoted one very lengthy tweet to transcribing her opening rant. Indeed, Houck filled his posts with more uncritical transcriptions of Leavitt.
Curiously, Houck failed to mention one instance in which Leavitt got her facts wrong. She claimed during the briefing that “DOGE and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money.” Houck curiously didn’t clip this statement — perhaps because even he knows it’s false.
It appears Houck was too busy slobbering over right-wing reporters getting the chance to ask questions. He gushed that Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich “respectfully grilled her on the administration revoking security details for Trump critics who remain under threat of Iranian assassination plots,” then cheering that “our friend Reagan Reese of the Daily Caller remarkable was called out by name with Leavitt acknowledging the last administration’s lack of (consistent) attention to the back rows:” That was followed by snping at CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, “who worked for the Caller before becoming a CNN liberal and has returned to the White House beat.”
Houck huffed that “The briefing ended with the Washington Examiner’s Christian Datoc, who somehow (and shamefully) had the only question about the soaring costs of eggs,” followed by more Fox News praise of Leavitt:
Fox News Channel host Jimmy Failla had it right in reviewing Leavitt’s performance. Roughly 30 minutes in, he quipped Leavitt didn’t seem to have “looked up a single answer” where as Jean-Pierre “would have gone through three binders and a Magic 8 Ball by now,” thus showing “why people wanna ditch DEI for Meritocracy.”
We doubt that Faila, like Houck, bothered to fact-check anything Leavitt said. They were too busy drooling over how she mindlessly sticks to the approved narrative.
Houck’s fangirling continued over a Jan. 29 TV appearance:
For her first broadcast network interview since officially taking office as White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt ventured into the far-left yet superficial lair of ABC’s Good Morning America, but drew the easiest choice of co-host in former NFL player Michael Strahan as opposed to George Stephanopoulos, who served in her position during the Clinton administration.
It started off fairly innocent: “And we want to start with the administration’s offer to buy — what — a mass buyout to federal employees out there. How many do you hope will take it? And by what percentage does the President want to downsize the federal workforce?”
After she said this was done “to make our federal government more efficient and productive and it is a fact that only six percent of the federal workforce here in Washington, D.C. actually shows up to the office,” which “is completely unacceptable.”
[…]
Side note: Leavitt should have asked Strahan if he was ever able to do his job as an NFL player from home and see what would have happened.
Leavitt’s claim about the number of federal employees who work at the office is wildly false — the number is actually 54 percent.
Houck gushed over the first right-wing interloper in the press room in his Jan. 31 post:
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt likely made more liberal media heads explode on Friday afternoon as, along with calling on our friends at the Daily Wire and receiving respectful yet tough questions from Fox’s Peter Doocy and Newsmax’s James Rosen, she called on one of the co-hosts from the Ruthless Podcast, a fine variety progrum.
Leavitt opened the Q&A portion of her second briefing on the job with the Ruthless as the recipients of the “new media” seat:
The misspelling of “program” is a quirk of the right-wing show, though Houck didn’t see fit to identify the show’s bias. Houck then moved to his longtime fluffing of his favorite biased Fox News reporter:
This went right into Doocy Time. While more than a few probably thought Fox’s Peter Doocy would just roll over and ask softballs to a Republican administration, they were proven wrong. Just like he did with Biden regime officials, Doocy asked brief but challenging and substantive questions, starting with this:
[…]
Doocy slightly rephrased it for a follow-up: “Was the air traffic controller in the DCA tower on Wednesday night, hired or not fired at some point because of his or her race?”
Leavitt also doubled down, saying she wouldn’t “confirm those” names although Trump “has still rightfully pointed out that there has been problems with the aviation industry over the past several years, and this started under Barack Obama in 2014.”
Doocy’s final question concerned the helicopter: “And when the President says on Truth Social, ‘The Blackhawk helicopter was flying too high, by a lot. It was far above the 200 foot limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it,’ is he suggesting a helicopter malfunction or a crew error or a crew doing this intentionally?”
Leavitt replied that Trump was simply stating a point that’s out in the ether, but otherwise would “let [the NTSB] investigation play out.”
Reinforcing the incestuousness of right-wing media, Houck spent a Feb. 3 post touting how the Ruthless podcast guy appeared on Fox News:
Fresh off having been the recipient Friday afternoon of the White House press briefing’s seats for new media, Ruthless Podcast co-host John Ashbrook dished to new 4:00 p.m. Eastern Fox News Channel host Will Cain what it was like to share a room with many of the reporters he had engaged with for years on Capitol Hill, drawing “a lot of my eye rolls and a lot of smirks.”
For those that missed it, Friday’s briefing was a reinforcement that it would be a new era in the Brady Briefing Room with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt not only keeping her promise to call on reporters representing a wider swath of the American public, but make space for newer forms of media like podcasts[.]
Houck cheered more on-message ranting from Leavitt— and praise for right-wing members of the press poll staying on message for Leavitt’s benefit — in his review of the Feb. 5 briefing:
On Wednesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s third press briefing mostly centered around two wildly different issues of transgenderism and the future of the Gaza Strip (especially in light of President Trump’s Tuesday claim the U.S. would take it over). And, as she’s done, called on a wide swath of reporters from legacy liberal networks to our friends in conservative media.
The “new media” seat went to podcaster and former longtime ESPN anchor Sage Steele, who was on-hand for Trump’s signing of an executive order ensuring only women and girls can safely compete in sports without fear of having to face transgender individuals.
Steele’s question correctly noted the executive order could be undone at any time whereas something passed by Congress would have the weight of law:
[…]
Fox’s Peter Doocy was next and was the only reporter to invoke the incendiary rhetoric from congressional Democrats on Tuesday against President Trump, Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Not surprisingly, Leavitt shredded them and cited the obvious about Musk and DOGE having been a campaign pledge[.]
Houck echoed Leavitt’s transgender obsession in noting that “our friend Mary Margaret Olohan at the Daily Wire tied the transgenderism executive order to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.”
In his review of the Feb. 12 briefing, Houck cheered Leavitt’s tirade against journalists who refused to be good little Trump-bots like she demanded:
Having decided in recent days to collectively settle on a new narrative of painting the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as a constitutional crisis and defend faceless, unelected bureaucrats as heroes, the liberal media Borg were handed a brutal reality check Wednesday with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made clear this disinformation campaign wouldn’t be tolerated.
Leavitt had this to say about the liberal media’s “fear-mongering” and claims the administration would ignore (far-left) federal judges yielding “radical injunctions” thwarting DOGE and ignoring the will of the people:
[…]
Thankfully, the thin-skinned liberal media reporters largely behaved themselves when it came to this issue.
Um, who was being “thin-skinned” here? Not the reporters. Houck went back to gushing how “Our friend Mary Margaret Olohan at the Daily Wire asked Leavitt to elaborate on the administration’s view of judges standing in the way of Trump’s agenda.” He concluded by a even more far-right reporter:
The briefing concluded with Gateway Pundit’s Jordan Conradson, who started with a question that, if asked by a progressive, would have been seen as eyeroll-inducing. Instead, he seemed to have been wanting to make a point about the left’s unhinged nature, which Leavitt diagnosed as the liberal media trying to sow division inside the administration:
Houck didn’t mention that Gateway Pundit is a highly discredited far-right outlet who had recently settled a defamation lawsuit by two Georgia election workers — the same ones who ultimately also got a settlement from Rudy Giuliani — but not before it tried to file a sham bankruptcy in order to avoid paying them.
Reporter rotation usurped
Houck continued his fangirling over Leavitt in a Feb. 25 post praising her partisan-driven shakeup of the White House press pool:
On Tuesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt sent shockwaves down the paper-thin spines of the White House press corps as she declared the end of the press pool as we know it and that the administration, not the smarmy White House Correspondents Association (WHCA), would determine the rotation of reporters who’d accompany the President in tighter confines, such as the Oval Office and on Air Force One.
Leavitt led into this with more bad news for the liberal media, which was her reaction to a federal judge denying “Associated Press’s emergency motion for a temporary restraining order against” her and two colleagues for kicking them out of the pool for their refusal to relabel the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
She correctly pointed out the pool and its perks are “a privilege that unfortunately has only been granted to a few” and “not,” despite what they assert, “a legal right for all.”
This led directly into her insistence that the pool — made up of one correspondent each from print, radio, and TV, the three wire services (AP, Bloomberg, and Reuters), and three photojournalists — would be expanded to ensure “new outlets to have a chance…to cover this administration’s unprecedented achievements up close, front and center.”
She provided those watching with a brief history lesson, including the elitist WHCA’s stranglehold on whomever they view as legitimate. Even in her announcement, she made clear such outlets would still be part of the rotation[.]
Of course, this means that Leavitt becomes the elitist, the one who will determine what media outlets are legitimate. Houck didn’t mention that, of course, let alone explain why that’s an improvement.
Tim Graham spun this announcement on his podcast the next day:
They called it a “bombshell” on Tuesday, when Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced they were going to take the credentialing and pooling powers away from the liberal press. Liberals screamed, conservatives cheered. New York Times reporter Peter Baker tweeted “this reminds me of how the Kremlin took over its own press pool and made sure that only compliant journalists were given access.” That’s not what Trump did.
Does Graham really think that restricting the press pool to compliant journalists is not the ultimate goal here?
Clay Waters complained in a Feb. 27 post that a PBS news show “featured guest Brian Stelter, editor of CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter (and reliable white knight for the mainstream media) to discuss the “chilling effect” of the Trump Administration blocking the Associated Press from the White House pool of reporters.” Houck spent a March 3 post being upset that even Fox News was asking critical questions about this move:
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared Sunday on the Fox News Channel’s MediaBuzz and debated host Howard Kurtz on a slew of subjects over two segments, including the Associated Press hubbub over its ban from the press pool (the smaller, rotating group of journalists that follow the President to smaller events and on Air Force One) and the press shop taking over the pool’s make-up.
[…]
Kurtz made clear his feelings about the pool from the top of the show, explaining the press and White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) were right to be “up in arms about a major change to the White House pool” because “White House officials will grant this privilege mainly to friendly reporters who have sympathetic questions.”
He also argued the WHCA should remain in power of who gets access to the President because “the big media companies pay most of the charges for flying on Air Force One[.]”
At another point, Kurtz brought up the press pool and said she could be looking to bar “legacy media outlets as part of the pool, largely picking friendly reporters who will ask friendly question.”
Leavitt said she’d “have to fundamentally disagree” noted two of their more recent poolers were vehemently anti-Trump outlets in The Independent and the Los Angeles Times on the print side and CNN as a TV pooler (on both Friday and Saturday).
“This is not about revoking the right of — of biased news organizations to be in the Oval Office or to cover this President. It’s simply about ending the monetized monopoly that the White House Correspondents’ Association has had over press coverage at the White House…The [WHCA] began more than 100 years ago. Certainly, the media and digital age has changed since the nine — early nineteen hundreds and we are simply trying to reflect that change,” she added.
Kurtz then defended the WHCA against claims of being “an elite group” because “its members are elected by the press corps at large to represent their interests and also there’s the question of who pays for flights on Air Force One as “a lot of people don’t know that the reporters are charged for that.”
Leavitt addressed both plus whether she still believes legacy media outlets have a role in the press corps[.]
Again: the obvious goal here is to eventually ease out anyone who’s not a part of the Trump Regime Media. Houck, like Graham, is being intentionally obtuse about this — after all, he’s part of that Trump Regime Media.