Is Fox News Channel going soft? In an election year? Some media figures seem to think the hard-right channel is going to the "middle," but this seems to be a figment of the centrist imagination.

New York magazine's Gabriel Sherman has a short piece trying to make this case. His first bit of evidence is that  Fox granted backstage access at its recent Republican debate to a New York Times reporter--as Sherman put it, "Fox's decision to allow Times scribe Jim Rutenberg into the building to confront the candidates in person." That sounds rather aggressive, and Sherman sees this as some sort of political shift:

That "sweating" session was a debate moderated by three Republican attorneys general, who are in some ways to the right of some of the candidates--particularly Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Given that the conservative base of the Republican party seems to have questions about the ideological commitment of these two--especially Romney--the fact that Fox convened a debate where the candidates had to field questions from the right doesn't really seem like playing to the "center."

Sherman argues:

The Sarah Palin hostage drama continues.

In case you haven't heard, Palin is taking a bus tour up the East Coast, visiting various sites of historic interest. Which naturally means that every media outlet is forced to follow along, covering  this series of non-events as if they are of tremendous importance, asking the pertinent questions: Is she running for president? Has she launched a crafty non-campaign that appears much like a campaign, without really being a campaign?

On Sunday (5/29/11), CNN host Howard Kurtz wondered:

Is the press in danger of being bamboozled by somebody who, in the end, is probably not going to run?

To me, being bamboozled would imply that you're being tricked. Corporate media are doing something they've done plenty of times before: giving Sarah Palin far, far more attention than she deserves.

Salon's Justin Elliott had a great round-up of the faux-bewilderment of the press corps. He cites these anecdotes:

According to the AP:

By some counts, more than 200 journalists trooped alongside Palin in Philadelphia....

And from the Times:

The CNN Express bus, filled with producers, camera operators and on-air talent, sat in Gettysburg for hours Monday, not even sure she was coming.

Hopefully Palin will release the journalist/hostages soon, so that they can go out and do the sort of reporting they would prefer to do.

Certain features of the White House story about the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound were irresistible to the media: A fierce firefight. The feared terrorist leader crouching behind his wife as the Navy SEALs approached, before resisting or possibly even reaching for a weapon. And on and on.

Of course, those details have been substantially altered by the White House, if not scrapped altogether. And thus we started to see headlines like this one in the New York Times: "Raid Account, Hastily Told, Proves Fluid." As that story put it:

a classic collision of a White House desire to promote a stunning national security triumph--and feed a ravenous media--while collecting facts from a chaotic military operation on the other side of the world.

If by "classic," the Times means to say that the government often misleads or lies about its accomplishments--well, no argument here. And demonstrating their sense of humor, the Times account included this:

"There has never been any intent to deceive or dramatize," a military official said Thursday, asking that he not be named because of ground rules imposed by the Department of Defense. "Everything we put out we really believed to be true at the time."

We never meant to mislead anyone--but don't quote me on that!

Judging by what some reporters are saying,  early accounts are often simply wrong.  On CNN's Reliable Sources (3/8/11), host Howard Kurtz and former CNN Pentagon reporter Jamie McIntyre had this exchange:

KURTZ: And there was a conference call with White House officials, and you're trying to assemble as much as you can. You assume these people know what they're talking about.

MCINTYRE: But you know, Howard, this was an avoidable misstep, because anyone who has covered the military for any period of time, or anyone who is briefed on military operations, knows that initial details on an operation are almost always wrong. And if they had simply been cautious about caveating the fact that they didn't have all the details, or that they might change, and by the same token, if the reporters are careful to say in the past, we know that often these initial details are not right, it wouldn't have looked nearly as bad.

So reporters either "assume these people know what they're talking about," or just know that "initial details on an operation are almost always wrong." If it's the latter, it would seem to me that most reporters carry that knowledge around without sharing it with readers or viewers. In fact, a network correspondent once told me almost exactly the same thing that McIntyre is saying here. I remember being shocked, because the reporter's work betrayed no such skepticism towards official claims.

This was a well-planned assault, closely watched by elite planners at Washington. For reasons that are entirely  unclear, they delivered a highly misleading account to reporters and the public. They've made their corrections--or at least adjustments--but think about how often this might be happening, in Afghanistan or elsewhere. An airstrike reportedly kills civilians; the Pentagon issues a denial.  How often do reporters treat those denials with sufficient skepticism?

In 2007 Harper's journalist Ken Silverstein wanted to do a story on Beltway lobbyists' willingness to work on behalf of creepy dictators. So he went undercover:

I decided to approach some top Washington lobbying firms myself, as a potential client, to see whether they would be willing to burnish the public image of a particularly reprehensible regime.

The first step was to select a suitably distasteful would-be client. Given that my first pick, North Korea, seemed too reviled to be credible, I settled on the only slightly less Stalinist regime of Turkmenistan.

As he reported, some of the lobbyists he approached were perfectly willing to plot out ways they could improve his client's image among D.C. powerbrokers. Silverstein's reporting was criticized by Guardians of the Media Establishment like Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, who was very uncomfortable with Silverstein's methods. As he wrote, "No matter how good the story, lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as their subjects."

Today the New York Times (3/2/11) provides an update of a sort. Under the headline "Arab Unrest Puts Their Lobbyists in Uneasy Spot," Eric Lichtblau tells of "the elite band of former members of Congress, former diplomats and power brokers who have helped Middle Eastern nations navigate diplomatic waters here on delicate issues like arms deals, terrorism, oil and trade restrictions."

The news here is that these "Washington lobbyists for Arab nations find themselves in a precarious spot, as they try to stay a step ahead of the fast-changing events without being seen as aiding despots and dictators." Which is, of course, precisely what they do. Silverstein's work taught us that they have very little reluctance about working for torturing dictators--at least until those leaders' crimes become too difficult to ignore.

The Times story, with all its hedging and tip-toeing, is the kind of journalism that is acceptable in elite circles. As for Silverstein, he left Harper's, writing that "I frequently find myself numb to political news and, even worse, to the lifeless, conventional wisdom peddled by the Washington media."

MSNBC host Keith Olbermann's indefinite suspension for violating network policies regarding political donations lasted all of  two work days. On his Wednesday show (11/10/10), Olbermann brought up the point that FAIR made in our alert--the difficulty of squaring such a policy with MSNBC parent General Electric's political giving and multi-million dollar lobbying.

Olbermann was joined by Nation blogger Greg Mitchell and Howard Kurtz of CNN/Daily Beast. Olbermann asked Kurtz:

Howard, how far up the tree does it go?  If you and I and Greg can't donate, can our bosses donate?  Can our bosses' boss donate?  Can Rupert Murdoch donate?  Because surely, no matter what you might think of what I did, he must have more influence on what appears on TV news than I do.  And if it's not Rupert, what about the chairman of GE or of Comcast?

Kurtz replied:

Once you get up to the corporate level, where they're not meddling with newsroom decisions, whether it's Time Warner, General Electric, News Corp, then corporations are going to give money.  They lobby.  They have corporate interests.

That left Olbermann to say:

OLBERMANN: Greg, to your experience, is there a part of a company--another part of a company that puts on a news broadcast or publishes a newspaper that isn't involved, to some degree?  Do you know any chairman of the ultimate authorities who don't get involved in news decisions in some large sense, at least?

MITCHELL: You could probably talk about that better than I could, but, again, in the real world, the owners of companies have an interest.

Indeed. The temporary squelching of the Olbermann/Bill O'Reilly feud last year was reportedly arranged at the corporate level, between GE and NewsCorp executives.

And  during an interview with Al Franken (10/25/05), Olbermann once explained how political pressure from inside the news division worked:

You were good enough to come on this newscast with me late in the summer of 2003. It was August or September. And by coincidence, either the next day or the day before, Janeane Garofalo had been a guest on the newscast. And I got called into a vice president's office here and told, "Hey, we don't mind you interviewing these guys, but should you really have put liberals on, on consecutive nights?"

And a recent New York magazine article recounted the fight inside MSNBC over Phil Donahue's program, which was seen by some as too critical of the drive to war with Iraq. MSNBC heavyweights like Chris Matthews seemed to know that going to the bosses was how to change what was on the air:

Donahue's problems only increased when Chris Matthews let it be known that he wanted Donahue off the air. Matthews was a rising force at the network, with a reported salary of $5 million. He cultivated former GE CEO Jack Welch and had the ear of NBC CEO Bob Wright. (The two summered together on Nantucket.) Matthews saw himself as MSNBC's biggest star, and he was upset that the network was pumping significant resources into Donahue's show. In the fall of 2002, U.S. News & World Report ran a gossip item that had Matthews saying over lunch in Washington that if Donahue stays on the air, he could bring down the network.

That piece also quotes NBC CEO Robert Wright saying that MSNBC's post-9/11 strategy was to try and outfox Fox News: "We have to be more conservative than they are."

Rush Limbaugh (10/18/10), holding a photo montage from Drudge up to the "Dittocam," went off on a bizarre rant that suggested that Obama was possessed by supernatural evil (Mediaite, 10/19/10):

Folks, these pictures, they look demonic. And I don't say this lightly. There are a couple pictures, and the eyes, I'm not saying anything here, but just look. It is strange that these pictures would be released.... It's very, very, very strange. An American president has never had facial expressions like this. At least we've never seen photos of an American president with facial expressions like this.

It's not the first time that Limbaugh has literally demonized a Democratic politician; in 2001 (FAIR Press Release, 11/22/02), he gave Senate majority leader Tom Daschle the nickname "El Diablo," going on at length (7/20/01) about his diabolical tendencies: "How many different versions of Satan, the devil, have you seen in your life?... We've seen the comic devil of TV shows. We've even seen the smooth, tempting devil in Hollywood movies. Is Tom Daschle simply another way to portray a devil?"

When Daschle complained that after such attacks, "the threats to those of us in public life go up dramatically, on our families and on us, in a way that's very disconcerting," Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz (WashingtonPost.com, 11/21/02) stuck up for Limbaugh, saying, "Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy."

In 2010, it's hard to deny that hate-filled rhetoric can move unstable individuals to violence--though Limbaugh seems to be playing catch-up here with his rival on the right, Glenn Beck. Both hosts know full well that there's a large segment of their audience for whom demons and devils are not Halloween costumes but all too real supernatural threats.

In Howard Kurtz’s latest column (8/2/10), the Washington Post media reporter bemoans the new media atmosphere as a "search-and-destroy culture"  that is "as likely to vilify journalists as political and corporate leaders." Kurtz counts himself among those vilified journalists, citing recent criticism over his defense (7/22/10) of Fox News' handling of the Shirley Sherrod debacle:

I know what it's like to be caught in the crossfire. When I reported that Fox News did not air the Sherrod video until after she had been fired, I got hammered by the left, and some commentators just ignored the chronology. (And conspiracy theorists pounced when I left out that a Fox online story had run an hour or so before the firing--hardly the reason that Sherrod was canned.)

Those "conspiracy theorists" apparently include FAIR, which pointed out Kurtz's oversight on this blog two weeks ago (7/23/10). But FAIR is not alone; the L.A. Times (7/24/10) and Media Matters (7/29/10) made similar points.

Do you really have to be a "conspiracy theorist," though, to think that a White House that's worried that a story will appear on Fox News would keep an eye on Fox's websites? As FAIR noted in its original criticism:

If the question is whether Sherrod was "done in" by Fox, you have to ask a question that doesn't seem to concern Kurtz: How did the doctored videotape come to the attention of the Obama administration? As the Media Matters timeline discloses, many blogs and conservative websites, including Foxnews.com and Fox  Nation, were discussing Sherrod's "racism" hours before her resignation. Isn't it likely that the Fox News website was among the most prominent of these; and, in turn, isn't it possible that that's where the White House learned about the story?

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz  (7/22/10) defends  Fox News against charges it promoted Andrew Breitbart's fraudulent Shirley Sherrod story--because, he says, Fox's news division didn't even address the story until after Sherrod resigned. In an extensive defense of Fox, Kurtz also cites an e-mail circulated by a Fox executive to the channel's news division, cautioning news staff to be careful with the story. Here's Kurtz:

But for all the chatter--some of it from Sherrod herself--that she was done in by Fox News, the network didn't touch the story until her forced resignation was made public Monday evening, with the exception of brief comments by O'Reilly. After a news meeting Monday afternoon, an e-mail directive was sent to the news staff in which Fox senior vice president Michael Clemente said: "Let's take our time and get the facts straight on this story. Can we get confirmation and comments from Sherrod before going on-air. Let's make sure we do this right."

In fact, as a Media Matters time line of Sherrod coverage clearly reveals, Fox did "touch the story" before Sherrod's resignation. Before the resignation, FoxNews.com published a report stating,  "Days after the NAACP clashed with Tea Party members over allegations of racism, a video has surfaced showing an Agriculture Department official regaling an NAACP audience with a story about how she withheld help to a white farmer facing bankruptcy."

Though not part of the news division, Fox Nation, an activist arm of the cable channel owned and operated by Fox News, hosted discussions smearing Sherrod--and by association, the Obama administration--as racist prior to Sherrod's resignation. So O'Reilly was not the only facet of Fox News advancing the smears before Sherrod was forced to step down.

By limiting himself to Fox stories and segments appearing before the resignation, Kurtz sets up an artificial time frame that discounts Fox programming that continued to smear Sherrod well afterwards: O'Reilly was joined by a virtual chorus of Fox News hosts (e.g., Sean Hannity, 7/19/10), substitute hosts (e.g., Dana Perino, On the Record With Greta Van Susteren, 7/19/10) and contributors (Monica Crowley and Alan Colmes on O'Reilly--see MediaMatters, 7/20/10) advancing the Breitbart smears. Why such stories aren't worthy of Kurtz's scrutiny is not explained.

If the question is whether Sherrod was "done in" by Fox, you have to ask a question that doesn't seem to concern Kurtz: How did the doctored videotape come to the attention of the Obama administration? As the Media Matters timeline discloses, many blogs and conservative websites, including Foxnews.com and Fox  Nation, were discussing Sherrod's "racism" hours before her resignation. Isn't it likely that the Fox News website was among the most prominent of these; and, in turn, isn't it possible that that's where the White House learned about the story? The fact that Sherrod claims somebody from the administration told her she was going to be on Glenn Beck's show on Monday night suggest that the White House believed, correctly, that Fox News was on the story.

In another passage, Kurtz mentions Andrew Breitbart's promotion of the notorious undercover ACORN video tapes:

Breitbart has worked closely with Fox opinion hosts in the past, most notably when he posted videos of two young activists ostensibly posing as a pimp and prostitute and seeking help from ACORN offices. Breitbart promoted those tapes on Sean Hannity's Fox program and the network gave them heavy play.

A reader who was learning about this story from Kurtz's reporting would be unaware that the  ACORN tapes, like the Sherrod video, were also a hoax, misleadingly edited to suggest things that never happened. For instance, the man Kurtz refers to as "ostensibly posing as a pimp...and seeking help from ACORN offices," never wore the pimp outfit into ACORN offices, and generally presented himself as trying to protect his "girlfriend" from a pimp (Extra!, 4/10).

Kurtz has a history of defending Fox News against self-evident claims that the cable channel harbors pro-conservative and pro-GOP biases. To be fair, Kurtz has distinguished Fox's news shows from its opinion programs, which he once said (Washington Post, 2/5/01) "may cast an unwarranted cloud on the news reporting which tends to be straightforward."

However, the evidence of Fox's right-wing bias, even on its news shows--which earn relatively low ratings next to the opinion shows the network is actually famous for--is extensive. (See here and here.)

In fact, earlier this month, Kurtz (Washington Post, 7/12/10) backed off from his defense of Fox news programs, reporting that the daytime news show Fox's America's Newsroom had a lopsidedly conservative guest list.

But Kurtz's brush with reality has apparently passed, as he reverts to his previous position in defense of Fox News.

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz (6/21/10) write about the investigative journalism produced by the Center for Public Integrity, and wonders about its independence:

The center has also received grants--including $300,000 last year--from the Open Society Institute founded by liberal philanthropist George Soros, sparking questions about whether its news agenda leans to the left. "We have a very clear firewall editorially," Buzenberg says. "We decide what we want to do and how we want to do it." Donors, he says, "may hate it and they may never fund us again, that's their right. . . .  It isn't free to produce. We've got to get money."

OK, I guess that's a concern on some level.

But if I were to ask Kurtz if the Washington Post's reliance on major corporate advertisers to continue publishing is "sparking" any questions about the paper's "news agenda," I think he'd wonder if I was a space alien.

People have interpreted the Helen Thomas controversy an number of ways. Some were disappointed in her remarks,  since they are overshadowing the fact that for years she's asked questions about issues that the rest of the press corps didn't care about.

Others have suggested that Thomas' questions about war and the killings of civilians were a warning sign,  and that other journalists should have stepped in to stop her sooner.

That's the view of the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, who led his piece today (6/14/10) with this:

There she goes again.

That was the eye-rolling reaction in the White House pressroom when Helen Thomas would go off on one of her rants about the Middle East.

Kurtz explained that Thomas was protected by her eye-rolling colleagues:

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that she was a member in good standing of a tightly knit club that refused to question why a woman whose main job seemed to be to harangue press secretaries and presidents deserved a front-row seat in the briefing room....

Journalists, especially those who spend a great deal of time together, don't usually turn on each other. If Thomas was spewing bias and bile, the reasoning went, what was the harm?

Bias and bile? Kurtz delivered the proof:

There was something to admire in Thomas' determination to ask uncomfortable questions. But when she declared George W. Bush the "worst president ever" in 2003, she shed any pretense of fair-mindedness. As time went on, her questions turned into speeches, as in this 2007 challenge to Bush over Iraq:

"Mr. President, you started this war. It's a war of your choosing. You can end it, alone. Today. At this point bring in peacekeepers, U.N. peacekeepers. Two million Iraqis have fled the country as refugees. Two million more are displaced. Thousands and thousands are dead. Don't you understand? We brought the al-Qaeda into Iraq." One might agree or disagree with those sentiments, but she was performing as an activist, not a journalist.

Kurtz goes on to write that "Hearst bears some responsibility for keeping Thomas on as her behavior grew more disturbing."

This is reminiscent of the New York Times story about Thomas (6/7/10) lamenting the "increasingly hostile and outlandish nature of her questions"--which was illustrated by the observation that Thomas "seemed particularly critical of the Iraq War and repeatedly pointed out during White House briefings that the American-led invasion was costing civilian lives."

Kurtz also led his Sunday CNN show with the Thomas controversy (6/13/10). To drive home the point that Thomas was trouble, he showed these apparently damning excerpts:

THOMAS: Does the president think that the Palestinians have a right to resist 35 years of brutal military occupation and suppression? It could have stopped the bombardment of Lebanon. We have that much control with the Israelis.

TONY SNOW, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I don't think so, Helen.

THOMAS: We have collective punishment against all of Lebanon and Palestine.

SNOW: No, what's interesting, Helen--

THOMAS: And what's happening--and that's the perception of the United States.

SNOW: Well, thank you for the Hezbollah view.

THOMAS: Mr. President, you started this war, the war of your choosing. And you can end it alone today. Thousands and thousands are dead. Don't you understand?

Kurtz responded by wondering, "What correspondent or columnist gets to say things like that?"

He added:

If you look at some of the soundbites we just played, some of the questions that she's asked over the years, I would agree, to some extent, she basically didn't care what people thought of her. She was there to ask the kind of questions, particularly to President Bush, who she did not like, that she called one of the worst presidents ever.

Now hold on a second. Helen Thomas didn't care what people thought of her? And by "people," does that mean other White House correspondents? Scandalous indeed.

From his Web column today (4/16/10):

After initially dismissing the tea types as an unimportant sideshow, the media are drinking deeply from that particular cup, especially with today being Tax Day and all.

If by "dismissing" Kurtz means "featuring on the network evening newscasts," he might have a point--since that's how last year's Tea Party Tax Day protests were actually covered.

But Kurtz has always had weird ideas about how much coverage the Tea Party events should receive. A year ago he criticized several newspapers for not devoting enough coverage to the protests--though the actual protests, uhh, hadn't happened yet: "The Washington Post has done zip until today, with a story on two planned D.C. parties on Page B-4.... The Los Angeles Times did a 500-word piece on a small protest in Hermosa Beach and has a media piece today."

Update: Amy Gardner and Michael Ruane have a news report  in the Washington Post today (4/16/10) on the Tea Party protests that would seem to meet even Howard Kurtz's standard for boosterism, particularly with this passage:

The showing, while smaller than the crowds that gathered in Washington on Sept. 12, made clear that the ire and energy that have defined the tea party movement since it became a force last summer have not abated.

Funny, you would think that smaller crowds would be a sign that the "ire and energy" of the Tea Party movement have abated.  Isn't that what "abated" means?

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz turns in a profile of Glenn Beck today (3/15/10) that includes a few interesting anecdotes. He reports that "Fox staffers note that veteran producer Gresham Striegel left the network after clashing with Beck and say the host has surrounded himself with loyalists" from his own radio company, and that "a vice president was assigned 'to help keep an eye on that program' and review its content in advance--a full-time job."

Kurtz also notes that some Fox reporters aren't crazy about what his new fame is doing to them:

Beck has become a constant topic of conversation among Fox journalists, some of whom say they believe he uses distorted or inflammatory rhetoric that undermines their credibility.

Yes, Beck is somehow undermining Fox's credibility in a way that that Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Geraldo Rivera and Brit Hume hadn't managed to do yet.

Fox has always been conservative-- it was founded on an explicitly political agenda, after all--albeit one that Fox anchors and personalities would occasionally try to argue was merely a myth cooked up by the liberal media.

So what these Fox reporters are really saying is that Beck's presence on Fox makes it more difficult to fool people.

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz spends his Sunday mornings as the host of Reliable Sources, the media criticism show on CNN. Yesterday (12/13/09), one segment concerned the Washington Post's decision to print an op-ed (12/9/09) on "Climategate" by Sarah Palin.

It prompted this exchange with guest John Aravosis of Americablog:

ARAVOSIS: What newspapers aren't supposed to do is present an issue that's already decided as being a he said/she said of, hey, half the people say yes, half the people say no.

KURTZ: So you say it's already decided.

ARAVOSIS: Ninety percent of scientists believe global warming is manmade.

KURTZ: And Sarah Palin has said that manmade activity contributes to global warming.

I'm not sure where Palin said that, but in her Post op-ed she wrote this:

But while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes.

When Fox News Channel was developing Sean Hannity's TV show, it was known as Hannity & Liberal To Be Determined. That liberal turned out to be Alan Colmes, who would eventually leave the gig after doing his part by playing the Washington Generals to Hannity's Harlem Globetrotters. It hardly mattered who sat in the "left" chair--they were there to get roughed up by the home team.

Until recently, professor Jane Hall was a regular guest on the O'Reilly Factor, debating conservative Bernie Goldberg. She's left Fox, and as she explained to CNN's Howard Kurtz (10/25/09), she never considered herself a liberal anyway:

KURTZ: When you appeared regularly on O'Reilly, were you there as a token from the dreaded MSM?

HALL: Well, I was there as a defender of the MSM. And you wouldn't believe how many famous journalists I talked to, who said better you than me. Let me tell you my side of the story. They didn't want to come on. It is hard to do, because it was like, when did you quit beating your wife? That was usually the question. But I felt it was worth doing.

KURTZ: Do you consider yourself a liberal?

HALL: No.

KURTZ: You were paired with Bernie Goldberg, the conservative point of view, who wrote a book about the media's slobbering love affair with Barack Obama?

HALL: Right.

KURTZ: So was that a fair pairing, to have someone who has that point of view, and you? You consider yourself a journalist.

HALL: I consider myself a journalist. I'm now able to say opinions because I'm a professor. I consider myself a moderate. In that universe, I was probably considered a wacky professor by O'Reilly. He would sort of pat me on the head and say, now, Jane, I know you liberals feel this way. And I'd say, I'm not really a liberal. So, yes, there's not necessarily a left/right comparison on there.

When NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Richard Engel recently returned from Afghanistan, he told MSNBC's Morning Joe, "I honestly think it's probably time to start leaving the country." Engel added, "I really don't see how this is going to end in anything but tears."

Engel's comments caused Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz (10/12/09) to raise an eyebrow at a reporter stating an opinion: "That sounds awfully opinionated for a working reporter," wrote Kurtz.

But we had to wonder if what really attracted Kurtz's scrutiny was Engel's stating of an opinion, or the opinion itself?

After all, for years FAIR has documented the phenomenon of journalists stating opinions in support of hawkish U.S. policies with virtual impunity--even when their views were catastrophically in error.

And so we wondered if Kurtz would even have commented if a network news reporter had suggested that the U.S. needed to escalate its military efforts in Afghanistan. We needn't have wondered.

Lara Logan, who holds the same position at CBS News as Engel does at NBC--chief foreign affairs correspondent--may be a more vehement cheerleader for escalation than Engel is for withdrawal. In a recent interview with Bob Orr on CBS News' Political Hotsheet, Logan expressed a disturbing devotion to  Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and chief proponent of escalating the war there: "I don't understand why no one will listen to the man you put your faith in and said he is the guy who is going to do this for us...."

Since Logan too "sounds awfully opinionated for a working reporter," we wonder how it is she escaped Kurtz's scrutiny?

For us, it isn't so much that journalists have and express opinions--the public is better served when we know what reporters are thinking--but we are troubled when  disapproval and despair over the lost standards of journalistic objectivity are trotted out only for reporters whose opinions are at odds with official views.

So we are glad to know of Logan's hero worship, even if it is at odds with the worthwhile  journalistic ethic that says reporters should hold the feet of the powerful to the fire--not massage them.
Corrected version: The original version of this post gave Stanley McChrystal's first name incorrectly.