Screenshot/Fox News
Fox News host Howard Kurtz accused Fox of 'barely' covering former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt's ouster.
- Fox News host Howard Kurtz pushed back on his own panelists who blamed media bias for former Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt's resignation last week.
- Kurtz suggested that his own network, in fact, displayed bias by "barely" covering Pruitt's ouster amid more than a dozen investigations into his conduct at the EPA.
Fox News host Howard Kurtz pushed back on his own show's panelists who blamed media bias for former Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt's resignation last week.
Instead of siding with his conservative-leaning guests, Kurtz said his network had failed to adequately cover the administrator's resignation last Thursday amid more than a dozen federal investigations into his conduct at the agency.
"Pruitt's resignation was barely covered on Fox in primetime or early the next morning ... and I think that was a mistake," Kurtz said on his Sunday program, adding that he spoke about the administrator's exit on Fox opinion host Laura Ingraham's show. (Ingraham, a prominent right-wing personality, publicly called for Pruitt to be fired just days before his ouster).
Two conservative panelists on Kurtz's show argued that reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere were motivated to conduct the investigative journalism that exposed dozens of allegations of Pruitt's unethical behavior by their personal opposition to the Cabinet secretary's conservative policy agenda.
Pruitt "was trying to take apart the Obama-era EPA regulations and he accomplished a lot of that, and I think that fueled the investigatory desires of journalists to try to take him down, and outside groups and people within the EPA to try to take him out for that very reason," said The Washington Examiner's Susan Ferrechio. "He made himself a very easy target, clearly. But he would not have been the same level of target if he had a different job within the administration."
Mollie Hemingway, an opinion writer at the conservative website The Federalist, added that Pruitt's unusual living arrangement, in which he paid $50 a night to rent a DC condo owned by the wife of an energy lobbyist, was approved by the EPA's ethics office.
The same senior ethics official later called for new probes into Pruitt's activities and allegations that he abused his government position and misused taxpayer money.
Kurtz has long criticized Pruitt's ethically questionable activities, which included directing government employees to assist him with personal chores and spending copious government funds on luxury travel and security.