I'm assuming the irony of that premise is obvious. Am I overestimating you?
Howard Kurtz: I brought up Bill Clinton (and Spitzer and McGreevey and Edwards) on my program yesterday after running through the list of recent Republican miscreants (Sanford, Ensign, Vitter). How can any discussion of philandering politicians not mention the impeachment of a president? Of course, I'm sure Rudy would rather talk about that than how he started dating his current wife while living with his then-wife in Gracie Mansion.
The questioner was clearly pointing out -- as the previous one did -- that Brzezinski allowed Giuliani to bring up Bill Clinton's infidelity without challenging him on his own. But Kurtz still couldn't wrap his mind around this simple concept. Instead, Kurtz responds as though the question was about the propriety of Bill Clinton being mentioned at all.
It's as if someone had pointed out that two plus two equals four, and Kurtz responded "Duluth."
The rest of the discussion went on like that. A reader pointed out that neither John McCain nor Newt Gingrich, both of whom famously had affairs, were mentioned in media coverage of Mark Sanford's affair. Kurtz missed the point entirely. A reader asked about the Pitney controversy; Kurtz misstated facts about it in his response. Another reader asked about Pitney's statement that Milbank had quietly called him a name during the Reliable Sources taping, a charge Kurtz had been aware of for a day, and had addressed on Twitter. Kurtz responded that the video is inconclusive -- but gave no indication that he took the basic step of asking Milbank about it, despite the fact that they share a newsroom.
On Wednesday, Kurtz included a lengthy excerpt of a defense of Milbank in his online column. Despite widespread criticism of Milbank's Reliable Sources appearance, the only criticism of Kurtz's fellow Postie that made it into any of his columns was a pox-on-both-their-houses excerpt on Monday.
On Monday, Kurtz touched briefly on the Post's decision to get rid of Dan Froomkin:
Liberal bloggers have been lambasting The Post for dropping Dan Froomkin and his White House Watch column. Washington City Paper Editor Erik Wemple reports that the main issue was Froomkin's $100,000 contract and his declining traffic:"
Kurtz then quoted a few paragraphs of Wemple's work. And that's all he's written about Froomkin. Note that Kurtz didn't actually quote any of the "liberal bloggers" (or others) who have been critical of the decision to drop Froomkin, or even indicate what their points were.
And Kurtz's description of Wemple's piece is just wrong. Wemple didn't "report" that the main issue was Froomkin's contract and traffic; he asserted that to be the main issue. That may seem like a subtle distinction, but it is an important one -- and it should be an obvious one to the nation's most famous media critic.
Just to spell things out: the best-case scenario for Howard Kurtz's employer is for people to think that Froomkin was let go for financial and traffic reasons. And Howard Kurtz overstated the extent to which Wemple established that Froomkin was let go for financial and traffic reasons. Given his access to the people involved, you would think Kurtz might do some original reporting rather than simply hyping Wemple's Post-friendly take on the story. But he hasn't.
So two of the biggest media stories of the past few weeks have involved Kurtz's Washington Post colleagues. And in both cases, he has not only managed to avoid criticizing those Post colleagues in his column, he has also neglected to quote anything more than token criticism from others, while using his Post column to misleadingly promote defenses of the Post.
Finally, Kurtz got scooped by Politico on an explosive story about his own newspaper becoming "a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters" and selling lobbyists access to its reporters:
For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" -- Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper's own reporters and editors.
The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it's a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its "health care reporting and editorial staff."
The offer -- which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters -- is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.
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