Fox News’ Howard Kurtz defended his network’s lack of coverage on Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) newly-revealed comments by suggesting it might not be a “big story” that the House minority leader was caught in a lie.

Kurtz was interviewing Glenn Greenwald for MediaBuzz on Sunday when he brought up McCarthy denying that he suggested former President Donald Trump resign after the events of Jan. 6. McCarthy claims he never went through with that suggestion even though he was caught on tape speaking to Republican leadership and saying he wanted to ask Trump to resign.

The Fox News host said the media is accusing McCarthy of “telling a falsehood,” Greenwald agreed with the charge, saying McCarthy is “trying to move the goalpost” after denying what he was recorded saying.

It is so clear that he got caught lying. If you want to defend him…it’s a very hard job to manage a Republican caucus with 250 very disparate voices with Donald Trump hovering over you. There was a lot of emotions surrounding 1/6, but we should demand from our political leaders the basic obligation not to tell lies to the public, and the fact that he got caught red-handed should be a pretty significant event for him.

Kurtz followed up by remarking that CNN and MSNBC covered the story “around the clock” on Friday while Fox mentioned McCarthy three times. A search via the media monitoring service Snapstream reveals that two of the mentions were brief, on Martha MacCallum’s The Story, and Shannon Bream’s Fox News at Night. Bret Baier covered the audio more extensively on Special Report Friday, presenting a full report followed by a panel discussion. Prior to MediaBuzz, no Fox News opinion show had mentioned the audio since it was released Thursday night.

“Is it a big story?” Kurtz asked. “We already knew McCarthy, who had publicly criticized the president at the time, later went to Mar-a-Lago and mended fences. But again, it comes back to denying what was already on tape.”

Greenwald took the position that “covering it is reasonable, but excessively covering it is what happened because obviously there’s a partisan agenda involved.”

“That’s a measured way of putting it,” Kurtz said as he wrapped up the segment.

Watch above, via Fox News.

The post Fox News’ Howard Kurtz Defends Network Barely Covering Bombshell Kevin McCarthy Audio: Is it Really a ‘Big Story?’ first appeared on Mediaite.

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