Howard Kurtz: Quisling

I'm not quite sure who Kurtz is sucking up to in this column, but let's Fisk him anyway, for the sheer fun of it:

Could this be the perfect storm of bad news for the news media?

Already hemorrhaging readers and viewers and losing public trust, the mainstream media are being battered hourly by the surging denizens of the blogosphere, accused of raw partisanship, rank incompetence and conspiratorial coverups.

Oh, the drama!

And hasn't the MSM made a cottage industry accusing various groups they don't care for en masse of raw partisanship, rank incompetence, and conspiratorial coverups?

Newspapers, networks and magazines aren't likely to vanish anytime soon (and if they did, what would the bloggers talk about?), but their credibility is under assault as never before, and a series of self-inflicted wounds haven't helped.

Well, the MSM has always pretended to favor the cleaning power of sunshine, right?

In just two years, the fabrications of Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley have led to the ouster of the top editors of the New York Times and USA Today; CBS News melted down in using apparently bogus documents for a story on President Bush; major outlets published mea culpas on their flawed reporting about the White House's march to war in Iraq; columnist Robert Novak revealed the name of a CIA operative, sparking a probe that could send two other reporters to jail; more journalists were fired for plagiarism; Sinclair Broadcast Group planned to air an anti-John Kerry film close to Election Day before backing off; Fox's chief political reporter ridiculed Kerry as a metrosexual, and Armstrong Williams and two other columnists acknowledged taking money from the Bush administration. Not to mention the usual array of biases and blunders (remember that New York Post cover on Kerry picking running mate Dick Gephardt?).

Hmm, seems a little slanted toward the only extant examples of pro-conservative bias, doesn't it?

Didn't we miss a couple of big ones here, Howie?

Oh yeah---wasn't there some sort of scandal which cost your CNN boss his job?

Even journalists aren't defending journalism these days. In one poll last year, nearly half said that reporting is increasingly sloppy and filled with errors, and that reporters often let their ideological views color their work.

So is it the job of journalists to "defend journalism" or to disseminate facts?

Given your omission of Eason Jordan's resignation in the above paragraph, Howard, I guess we know how you'd answer that question.

So do the much-maligned media do anything right?

Well, they do whore for Democrats pretty well.

Maybe a few things. It's mighty expensive to cover wars and maintain bureaus around the world. Some news organizations do that.

How do they manage to do it?

The meat-and-potatoes of community news -- city council meetings, zoning changes, school boards -- are still blanketed by local papers.

Yeah, no way bloggers could handle the awesome task of covering zoning changes.

Old-fashioned, shoe-leather investigative reporting -- from Bernard Kerik's business problems to the Abu Ghraib abuses -- is regularly executed by staffers at large organizations who specialize in developing sources and sifting through documents. (It was newspapers that revealed Blair and Kelley's lies and Williams's $240,000 Education Department contract.)

It is also newspapers who lie and refuse to correct the record when caught doing so.

And television remains unsurpassed at covering breaking news (wars and tsunamis) and bringing the nation together at times of tragedy and sadness (9/11, space shuttle explosions, Ronald Reagan's death).

Hmmm, where's that wonderful 9/11 television coverage now?

But now, for the first time, millions of people with access to a wide audience (at least among the wired) are looking over the shoulders of journalists, or practicing journalism themselves. They are Googling and Nexis-ing and dissecting video and transcripts. Many bloggers are careful and thought-provoking, others partisan or mean-spirited. But they are here to stay, and by and large they provide a healthy check on those who once monopolized the news agenda.

I suppose that the people on the bulletin boards, the folks at the Media Research Center and other watchdog groups, in addition to the various talk radio shows which routinely discuss media bias---all competitors in some form or fashion to your potemkin media criticism show on CNN---were illegitimate and beneath notice, but now that bloggers have taken out your CNN boss, we suddenly rate?

Are you getting a bit nervous, Howard? Feeling insecure, perhaps?

If I were the Baghdad Bob of the tottering MSM regime, I'd be nervous too.

In the wake of CNN executive Eason Jordan's resignation under pressure following harsh online criticism over his remarks about the U.S. military, Steve Lovelady, who edits the online edition of Columbia Journalism Review, complained to another blogger about a "lynch mob" of "salivating morons," later writing that no one "can mediate the wrath when the headhunters smell blood."

Ahh, so we saved the Jordan story to reintroduce the bloggers-as-lynch-mob meme the MSM's been trying to peddle.

This drew a rather pointed response from Will Collier at VodkaPundit: "We're not impressed by either your bluster or your insults. You aren't higher beings, and everybody out here has the right -- and ability -- to fact-check your [butts], and call you on it when you screw up and/or say something stupid. You, and Eason Jordan, and Dan Rather, and anybody else in print or on television don't get free passes because you call yourself 'journalists.' "

Umm, so Steve Lovelady's calling bloggers' "salivating morons" isn't to be considered "pointed"? How do you characterize such silly, paranoid remarks, Howard? "Reasoned"?

But Duncan Riley countered in the Blog Herald: "What is unique in the war on blogging is that the battles are not one based on politics, but one based on hatred of the blogosphere by the old media as it continues to lose readership and the revenues a large readership attracts."

Who was he countering? You make it sound like he was correcting VodkaPundit, instead of lending weight to his argument.

If only you had editors, unlike those bloggers---wait, you do!

Charlie Madigan, who writes a blog for the Chicago Tribune, had this message for his Old Media colleagues: "Shut up with your whining and appreciate the fact that, after generations of stagnation, something new has arrived. . . . Conventional journalism seems aghast that a whole collection of independent voices from all sides of the political spectrum are popping up now to pick and smear and slander and point accusing fingers, wreck careers, cast aspersions and introduce something besides a century-old sense of entitled hierarchy to the formula for news presentation."

Somebody gets it, anyway. The bloggers could be your best friend, Howie, if you actually cared to call a spade a spade when your MSM buddies screw the pooch.

If there's one thing bloggers enjoy more than bashing the press, it's arguing with each other. Matt Dattilo at Opaque Lucidity says: "There's a saying in football: When you get to the end zone, act like you've been there before. The blogosphere threw a harsh light on a 'journalist' [Jordan] who needed a smackdown. Congratulations. . . . If the blogosphere is going to insist on doing a little celebratory jig every time some liberal [butthead] puts his foot in it, we will all soon look as if we ARE hunting for heads to put on the wall."

Excuse me for noting that nailing Dan Rather and Eason Jordan are RARE victories for those committed to media accountability. Thanks to guys like Howard Kurtz who dislike real accountability, and instead use their "media critic" platforms to diminish MSM felonies (when they deign to cover them at all) while damning conservative misdemeanors, guys like Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw get a complete pass on their naked biases and politicking.

Those who dismiss the new cybercritics should remember that bloggers draw strength from their relationship with readers. It was typography experts sending e-mail that enabled conservative blogs to blow the whistle on Dan Rather's National Guard documents, while Web experts helped liberal bloggers reveal former White House reporter Jeff Gannon's real name and X-rated background. In reporting, it turns out, a little interactivity goes a long way.

Something certainly for you to keep in mind, Howard, say the next time you run an "interactive" q&a and somehow fail to take questions on a breaking media scandal involving your boss.

Of course, after he resigned, you took questions and commented on how "important" a story you had to be dragged kicking-and-screaming to cover was---from the safe perspective of hindsight.

All of which prompted Captain's Quarters to coin the verb "To Kurtz", meaning "to provide cover for someone through the deliberately selective reporting of facts, just enough of which to protect the reporter against charges of falsification while accomplishing a purposeful misdirection."

Don't bother sucking up to the blogosphere now, Howard. We know what you're about.

[Edited to include link to Kurtz' column---Teflon]