Certain jobs can threaten one’s sanity to such a degree that promotions ought to come with hazard pay.
In a news release on Monday, Fox News President and Executive Editor Jay Wallace announced that the company has promoted longtime White House correspondent Peter Doocy to the rank of — drum roll, please — senior White House correspondent.
“Peter’s commitment to providing viewers with hourly news and insight from the White House has remained steadfast since he started in this role straight off the 2020 campaign trail and we’re thrilled to have him continue doing so,” Wallace said.
“I am honored to continue bringing our viewers the latest on the news that impacts them the most from [the] White House and around the globe,” Doocy said in a statement.
First, we must acknowledge the elephant in the room.
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In recent years, I have met only one kind of Fox News viewer: the kind who stopped watching.
Within this group of former viewers, there are two categories of people: those who stopped watching after the network prematurely called Arizona for Joe Biden during the scandalous 2020 presidential election, and those who stopped watching after the network parted ways with host Tucker Carlson in April 2023.
Those former viewers realized that Fox News exists to give the illusion of choice and to obscure the uniparty reality.
Meanwhile, those who continue to watch the faux-conservative network have done so for reasons I can only guess.
Do you watch Fox News?
Still, Doocy deserves tremendous credit for the hostile waters he has navigated.
After all, the now-senior White House correspondent has had to tussle with such nasty-spirited intellectual lightweights as Biden and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. And he has done so while largely maintaining good humor.
In 2022, for instance, Biden had a possible hot-mic moment when he referred to Doocy as a “stupid son of a b****,” according to CBS News. Afterward, Doocy magnanimously joked that “nobody has fact checked him yet and said it’s not true.”
In February, the president became irritated when Doocy asked him about special counsel Robert Hur’s characterization of him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“My memory is so bad that I let you speak,” Biden replied.
Doocy’s regular nemesis, however, is Jean-Pierre.
To be clear, the White House press secretary qualifies as Doocy’s nemesis in the same way that the ACME Corp. qualifies as the Road Runner’s nemesis. Neither poses an actual threat in the manner one might expect, either intellectually or physically.
To his credit, Doocy has taken a good-natured approach during White House news briefings. Rather than bludgeon KJP with the Biden administration’s obvious failures and lies, he has posed difficult questions with a calm demeanor and then allowed the overmatched press secretary to expose the administration’s idiocy by either redirecting an accusation against Doocy or twisting herself into rhetorical knots.
On the whole, his questions about Biden’s hypocrisy and mental unfitness seem to have irritated Jean-Pierre the most.
To do her job, of course, she must lie in the service of liars. She must do the bidding of powerful people with sinister intentions. On the lighter side, she sometimes must extract her octogenarian boss from embarrassing situations.
Unintended comedy notwithstanding, exposure to so much dishonesty cannot be good for Doocy’s soul. How he preserves his sanity is anyone’s guess.
Thus, he richly deserves his promotion. Hopefully, it comes with hazard pay.
