The MRC vs. Oliver Darcy, Part 3
The Media Research Center begged for the media writer to be punished by the head of CNN for criticizing a CNN town hall -- but Darcy ended up having the last laugh.
The Media Research Center has a tendency to regularly attack media writer Oliver Darcy for essentially doing his job in watching the media — and this animosity hit a peak during the brief tenure of CNN chief Chris Licht.
When Darcy turned in a less-than-glowing review of a CNN town hall featuring Donald Trump, Nicholas Fondacaro sgrouse in a May 2023 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 post two days later:
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.
The MRC’s demand to punish Darcy got short-circuited when Licht was effectively fired a short time later. Houck then appeared on Tim Graham’s podcast later that day, where he repeated his previous talking points on Licht and CNN while refusing to apply those same standards to Fox News. Both Graham and Houck made sure to keep up their nasty attack on Darcy as a “Benedict Arnold” because he escaped the right-wing media bubble.
The MRC’s hatred also extended to CNN’s former boss, Jeff Zucker, whom Houck has regularly referred to as a “puppetmaster,” an apparent reference to his Jewish heritage. A July 2023 post by Houck cheered how Variety published a negative profile of Zucker while trashing Darcy for pointing out its errors.
Darcy Derangement Syndrome spreads
Issues with CNN are not the only excuse the MRC is using to lash out at Darcy. Fondacaro whined in an August 2023 post that CNN noted that Trump was skipping the debate, bizarrely blaming CNN for reporting it (not Trump for skipping it), sniping at the channel under the headline “Ankle Biter”:
Chronically the third-place cable news outlet, CNN was the little goblin biting at the ankles of Fox News, the cable news giant. So, of course, it brought CNN great joy to see that former President Trump had chosen to avoid taking part in the first Republican presidential debate, which was hosted by their rival. Senior media correspondent Oliver Darcy beamed on Monday as he boasted about Trump’s absence possibly hurting Fox News’s ratings.
“In two days, Republican presidential hopefuls are set to take the stage in the first primary debate. This one’s in Milwaukee. But the front-runner, former President Trump, he will not be there,” announced co-host Victor Blackwell.
Blackwell also noted that Trump would be attempting to do some counter-programming. “Sources tell CNN the former President plans to sit down for an interview with former Fox host, Tucker Carlson instead. The interview is set to air on X, formerly known as Twitter, around the same time as the debate,” he added.
Being CNN’s toy-sized attack dog, Darcy yipped about how much Trump’s absence was supposedly going to hurt the first-place network:
Later that month, Tim Graham used a post to complain that NPR media reporter David Folkenflik noted the revamped CNN streaming operation; he couldn’t stop whining that Folkenflik referenced Fox News:
Folkenflik can’t stop talking about Fox’s very expensive settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, but what about CNN’s finances or CNN’s struggling ratings? This is where NPR is doing more advertising than reporting. CNN’s own media reporter Oliver Darcy was more candid about the parent company’s finances!
Graham has never accused Fox News media reporters like Joseph Wulfsohn and Brian Flood of being candid about their employer, nor does he accuse them of being CNN-haters or criticize them for being obsessed with CNN the way he claims Folkenflik is obsessed with Fox News.
When Rupert Murdoch retired from Fox News, Fondacaro whined again in a September 2023 post:
On Thursday, Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corp. and News Corp., announced he would be stepping down later this year. But the fact he would be turning over control to his son Lachlan Murdoch threw cold water on any excitement Fox News haters in the liberal would have. The ones hurt most by that realization were the liberals of CNN, chief among them was media urchin Oliver Darcy who appeared on CNN’s Inside Politics to bellyache that Fox would not ditch their “right-wing” “world view.”
[…]
And in going to Darcy, Raju asked the Orwellian question: “What do we think about this change?”
Darcy opened his comments by stoking fear of Murdoch as “one of the most powerful people in the world” in terms of media and politics (you know, everything former CNN boss Jeff Zucker and his underlings wished he was).
“But I think People should be cautious and not jump to the conclusion that that means that the editorial bent of his companies is going to change,” Darcy warned viewers. He read from Murdoch’s memo to his staff and made it clear “Lachlan Murdoch is actually going to continue the tradition of allowing these companies to be right-wing in nature.”
Darcy, who used to write for The Blaze, scoffed at Murdoch for stating “there is a ‘battle for the freedom of speech,’ ‘for the freedom of thought.’” He took particular issue with Murdoch saying “Most of the media is in cahoots with those peddling political narratives rather than the truth.”
Fondacaro whined that Darcy pointed out those Fox News lies, attempting to play whataboutism in response:
Of course, he took the opportunity to make a dig at Fox News and their settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, calling “rich” of him. “[I]t would be irresponsible for me to read that to you without pointing out that Rupert Murdoch himself talks about people peddling narratives and not the truths when he just paid $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for knowingly advancing falsehoods about the 2020 election,” he sniped.
It would be irresponsible for NewsBusters to call out Darcy without pointing out that CNN had to similarly settle a $275 million defamation suit with Nick Sandmann after the liberal network spit venom at the then-teenager with false claims that he was a racist for smiling at a liberal protestor who assailed him. And the network that demanded transparency from others demanded the settlement stipulate that they couldn’t disclose the final price tag.
It would be irresponsible for ConWebWatch not to point out that Sandmann, in all likelihood, received much less than $275 million from CNN (the amount was not made public), and it’s entirely possible that he received little more than token go-away money, or to remind Fondacaro that we last saw Sandmann’s lawyer, L. Lin Wood, choosing to retire his law license rather than face discipline from the Georgia state bar for peddling falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
Graham used a November 2023 column to concede that NBC’s Republican presidential debate was much better than it claimed it would be, whining that Darcy complained NBC partnered with right-wing radio syndicator Salem for the debate, which contributed a co-moderator in radio host Hugh Hewitt:
Minutes before midnight, after the NBC debate, CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy seconded Barr in his “Reliable Sources” newsletter under the headline “Normalized by NBC News.” Darcy groused: “Respected news organizations typically do not partner with right-wing companies known for trafficking in extremism. But NBC News chose another path. On Wednesday evening, the news organization hosted the third GOP debate alongside Salem Radio and Rumble, helping to elevate and normalize both of the far-right outfits.”
Darcy offered the same dire warning on October 17. “It’s no surprise that the GOP, which veered sharply to the right during Donald Trump’s presidency, would select Salem and Rumble as partners,” he wrote. “But it is striking that NBC News would agree to link arms with such organizations.”
What Darcy did not include in these fulminations was the reporting from Puck News that his own network had floated names of conservative media personalities who could serve as co-moderators of a CNN debate, including….Hugh Hewitt.
You will not be surprised that neither pre-debate post by Geoffrey Dickens attacking NBC over the debate mentioned that it was partnering with Salem.
When it was revealed that the buyer of the Baltimore Sun turned out to be Sinclair Broadcasting Group chief David Smith, a right-winger. Houck huffed in a January 2024 post:
CNN reacted the way you’d expect. Oliver Darcy, their deranged liberal media hall monitor, whined in his media newsletter that it’s a “deal that has set off alarm bells” since Smith’s local stations around the country “has previously inserted right-wing editorial segments into its local news broadcasts.”
Writing on Threads and X, NPR media writer and former Sun reporter David Folkenflik huffed that “Smith was dismissive of the Sun‘s journalism” and “deflected questions about his own political activities.”
He also seethed that “Smith has been a major funder of GOP candidates; more recently he has funded far-right outfits like Project Veritas and Turning Point USA & financed local ballot initiatives.”
In other words, Darcy took the same tone the MRC does whenever a “liberal” or “left-wing” person is involved.