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.

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.

Howard Kurtz recently offered fellow Washington Post reporters Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza a chance to apologize for having, in an online Post feature, "implied Hillary Clinton was a 'bitch.'"

But American Prospect's Tapped blogger Adam Serwer (8/5/09) has a question regarding Milbank's aside that "it's a brutal world out there in the blogosphere.... I'm often surprised by the ferocity out there, but I probably shouldn't be":

What's the sound of a million hands facepalming? No one who goes around using obscenities to describe other reporters and administration officials should be complaining about the "ferocity" of blogs--if Milbank is bothered by it, he might start by admitting his own complicity in creating that kind of discourse.

Serwer's reiteration that "Milbank's unique place in the journalism world entails him making fun of people for a living" yields a simple maxim: "If you can't take it, don't dish it."

The business department at the Washington Post has gotten into trouble in what may be a case of too much truth in advertising.

As reported by Politico (7/2/09), the Post circulated a flyer offering--for the low, low cost of $25,000--an "intimate and exclusive Washington Post salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and publisher Katharine Weymouth." The circular promised the participation of "key Obama administration and congressional leaders" as well as "healthcare reporting and editorial staff members of the Washington Post."

Lest anyone be confused as to why dinner at the Post's publisher's house would be worth $25,000, the flyer helpfully points out that "an evening with the right people can alter the debate." It calls the event "an exclusive opportunity to participate in the healthcare reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done." It's quite straightforward: The Post is offering to help a deep-pocketed customer an opportunity to alter the healthcare reform process by granting access to government officials and its own journalists.

Naturally, one is not allowed to be that honest about the relationship between money, power and journalism in Washington, D.C.  A Post spokesperson told Politico that the advertisement was released "before it was properly vetted," and that the "draft does not represent what the company's vision for these dinners are, which is meant to be an independent, policy-oriented event for newsmakers." Boy, that doesn't sound as much like it's worth 25 grand, does it?

Post publisher Katharine Weymouth then did an interview with employee Howard Kurtz in which she vowed they were "not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom." But she was aware "of the plans to host small dinners at her home and to charge lobbying and trade organizations for participation." And Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli said that "he had been involved in discussions, stretching back to last year, about newsroom participation in conferences"--but the good kind of conference, not the kind that makes you look like a sleazy influence-peddler.

So it looks like they're going to go ahead with these things--"We do believe there is an opportunity to have a conferences and events business, and that the Post should be leading these conversations," the Post statement to Politico said--but presumably next time they won't market them so nakedly as an exchange of money for power.  Don't worry, Post Co., your clients will still know what they're buying.

ABC's Diane Sawyer claimed (CNN, 6/22/09) the network's June 24 forum on President Barack Obama's healthcare plan would feature "questions from every single vantage point."

Yet, ignoring calls from FAIR (Action Alert, 6/22/09) and advocacy groups such as Health Care Now!, the special did not include a single question from an advocate of single-payer national health insurance—despite the fact that the single-payer option polls well with the public (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09) and is seen by many experts as the best way of expanding coverage to the uninsured while also controlling costs.

In the wake of well-publicized flak ABC received from the Republican Party over the special, the Republicans' position that Obama's plan amounted to a "government takeover of healthcare" was reflected in the questions selected by ABC.

ABC's Charles Gibson asked Obama directly to respond to Republican criticism. Meanwhile, one of ABC's hand-selected questioners said he was concerned with "the big brother fear," asking, "How far is government going to go in reference to my personal life and healthcare treatments?" Another questioner, identified as an M.D., said he was "concerned" with "the government taking over healthcare."

The insurance industry's perspective was also well-represented in the forum, with ABC medical editor Timothy Johnson citing "critics" who say Obama's plan "would eventually put private insurers out of business." ABC also featured a question to Obama from the CEO of the major insurance company Aetna, as well as the head of the Lewin Group--which is owned by another major health insurance company, the United Healthcare Group.

(Four medical practitioners, the president of the American Medical Association, two family members of patients, a former government health official, two human resources managers and a small business owner were also selected by ABC to ask questions to the president.)

David Westin, president of ABC, had defended ABC's selection of guests for the forum, saying, "We will include a variety of perspectives coming from private individuals asking the president questions and taking issue with him, as they see fit." Just days before the forum, Sawyer stated on CNN (Reliable Sources, 6/22/09) that it was going to be "a room full of widely diverse ideas in which people who actually experience the reality of front-line healthcare are going to get a chance to pose their challenging questions to the president."

Yet the issue of single-payer was never raised by either the ABC interviewers or ABC's hand-selected guests, despite the fact that it is popular, and favored by 59 percent of physicians, according to recent peer-reviewed survey (Annals of Internal Medicine, 4/1/08). And despite the fact that even Obama's own doctor has criticized the government's plan in favor of a single-payer system.

In the entire ABC healthcare special, the single-payer option was only once mentioned, and dismissively, by Obama himself, in response to Republican charges that his healthcare proposal is a "Trojan horse" for "socialized medicine."

Yet, tellingly, for the corporate media's most influential media critic--Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz-– the main concern vis a vis the ABC forum was not the silencing of a popular reform proposal. Rather, it was the question of whether health insurance companies and other industry perspectives would be sufficiently represented in the forum.

In a segment on the ABC healthcare forum on CNN’s Reliable Sources, Kurtz stated to Sawyer:

You have the ultimate guest for this special, the president. Why not also include guests from the insurance industry, the hospital industry, the drug companies who also have a stake in this health care battle?

It would be a surprise to many Americans that they do not, in Kurtz's view, have a stake in healthcare reform.

But then again, corporate media's longstanding blackout on the single-payer option shows that corporate journalists have long seen the views of citizens as unimportant to the healthcare debate.

We've written about this before, but today (5/11/09) the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz turned in another example of journalists who seem to believe Google is what's killing their industry. Responding to talks between his employer and Google about some sort of collaboration, Kurtz writes:

Hanging over the talks is the reality that the search giant, while funneling vital traffic to news sites, vacuums up their content without paying a dime.

I'm not sure what it is that Google is accused of "vacuuming." Kurtz is likely referring to Google News, which lets users search many media outlets at once. The main Google News page features the headlines of what the search engine determines to be popular stories, sometimes with the first sentence or so of the accompanying article. Anyone who wants to read the full article can follow a link to the news site itself.

By way of analogy, for years most daily newspapers--including the Washington Post--have include a page of TV listings, giving the titles and air times of programs one might want to watch. Sometimes they go further and offer a plot summary; other times the paper will tell me that a given movie is terrible. Does all of this amount to stealing from the TV stations, since the newspaper profits from the ads it sells next to these listings? I wouldn't think so, but I'm not sure how what Google does is all that different.

Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz (5/3/09) seemed startled when the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza argued that "just because Bush or some previous president didn't garner as much coverage as Michelle and Barack Obama did doesn't tell you anything about press bias one way or another."

"Are you kidding?" Kurtz exclaimed.

He didn't express any similar surprise when CNN in-house conservative Amy Holmes came up with this "little-known fact":

The Washington Times reported this last week.... Actually, at this point in his presidency, Barack Obama is the fourth least popular of the past five presidents. You wouldn't know that from the press coverage, and you wouldn't know that George Bush...at this point in his presidency, in 2001, after having had the recount, not even winning the popular vote, in fact had higher Gallup approvals than Barack Obama does right now.

Well, no, you wouldn't know those things, because they aren't true. At the 100-day mark, Gallup found a job approval rating for Obama of 65 percent--three percentage points higher than the 62 percent that George W. Bush had at the same point in his first term. Gallup's polling found that Obama had a higher 100th-day approval rating than Bill Clinton, George Bush Sr., Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon as well. Of the last seven presidents, only Ronald Reagan, at 68 percent, had a higher job-approval rating--and Reagan, as Media Matters' Eric Boehlert pointed out (4/29/09), had just survived an assassination attempt in March 2001.

So how could the Washington Times have gotten it so wrong? A commenter on Media Matters' website traced this right-wing talking point back to a blog post by Judith Apter Klinghoffer on the History News Network (3/24/09). Klinghoffer declared that "Obama's Poll Numbers Trail Those of W."--a conclusion she reached by comparing Bush's job-approval rating to a number she calculated by combining the ratings of "excellent" and "good" received by Obama when people were asked what kind of job they thought he was doing.

Needless to say, you can't directly compare the answers to two different polling questions--particularly not when you can compare the results of the same question being asked. But the apples-to-oranges comparison produced results that were appealing to the right, so you soon saw James Pinkerton citing this bogus finding on Fox News Channel (4/25/09): "Judith Klinghoffer, writing for the History News Network, made the point that Obama ranked seventh out of the last nine presidents in Gallup poll opinion ratings. So seventh out of nine is not so good." Three days later, the Washington Times was making the same argument--and then it ends up on the not-so-well-named Reliable Sources.

Kurtz did take issue, sort of, with Holmes' claim, which ran counter to a wealth of polling data on Obama's approval ratings: "Although his numbers, we have to say, are pretty good." But when Holmes retorted: "They're pretty good, but comparatively. You're asking comparatively, how does the press treat these politicians different, and they do," Kurtz conceded: "OK. Fair enough."

Actually, that doesn't seem very fair at all.

With Fox News Channel relentlessly promoting--and MSNBC mostly mocking-- the right-wing "tea party" demonstrations around the country today, middle-of-the-road media critics are making a typically middle-of-the-road complaint: Yes, Fox shouldn't be sponsoring such events, but the rest of the corporate media shouldn't just ignore these allegedly newsworthy events.

As Howard Kurtz put it in the Washington Post today:

Some Fox News hosts have been pushing the tea party protests slated for hundreds of cities today, almost to the point that they seem to be the ringmasters of the event.  "It's now my great duty to promote the tea parties. Here we go!" Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney said the other day.

But there's another side to this saga. Most of the mainstream media fell down on the job, ignoring the growing movement or mocking it as a bunch of wingnuts.

The New York Times has run zero stories. (The only mention was Times columnist Paul Krugman taking a brief swipe at the parties.) The Washington Post has done zip until today, with a story on two planned D.C. parties on Page B-4. The Chicago Tribune ran a 300-word story and an item on postal workers mistaking tea for a hazardous substance. The Los Angeles Times did a 500-word piece on a small protest in Hermosa Beach and has a media piece today. The Boston Globe, published in the city famed for the original tea party, nothing. CNN ran its first news story on the protests Monday (followed by a piece by me on the coverage). MSNBC's coverage had consisted of Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox mocking the "teabagging" until Chris Matthews held a more serious debate on Monday.

I must say I'm struck by this new standard for coverage of citizen activism--papers should cover small protests, some of which haven't happened? Was this the standard for, say, anti-war protests in 2002 and early 2003?

The pressure to treat these events seriously seems to be having some effect. Moments ago CNN had a long introduction to its live report from the Boston tea party, explaining that the protests have spread across the country, stoked by plain old citizen passion. The correspondent on the scene in Boston then explained that there were perhaps a few dozen attendees on hand. I guess Howard Kurtz will be pleased.

Quoting Washington Post/CNN media "critic" Howard Kurtz slamming Headline News for "talking about this constantly on cable for more than a week" and "feasting on this terrible situation," Brad Jacobson (Media Bloodhound, 3/30/09) also cites Kurtz railing against media obsession with octuplet mother Nadya Suleman on CNN: "The media were demonizing her....all the while capitalizing on America's latest soap opera."

But, lo and behold, a "Crossfire-like vapid shouting match" couldn't be resisted:

Kurtz dedicated an entire segment of this past Sunday's Reliable Sources to a gratuitous pie fight between two players involved in Nadya "Octomom" Suleman's never-ending nationally televised freak show. But a little over a month ago, Kurtz decried the media's exploitation of the octuplet mother for ratings and for doing so under the false pretense that concern for her babies' well-being drove their 24/7 coverage.

While seeing evidence that "Kurtz seems to signal that he's in on the joke," as Jacobson sees it, "the problem is, he's not just in on the joke, he's part of the joke of which he's supposed to be critiquing." Picking from among "scores of worthy topics [that] were open for a substantive media discussion," Jacobson writes that Kurtz instead

might have covered the fact that, according to LexisNexis, not one broadcast or cable network news program--including CNN--reported last week's revelations that Bush administration prosecutors tried to pressure former Guantánamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed, after years of being brutally tortured and having never been charged with a crime, to sign a statement saying he was never tortured and that he committed terrorist acts he didn't commit in return for his release.

Even though "it's no Octomom," Jacobson says this is "merely the kind of story that, consciously or not, affects every single American when millions of them are deprived of its coverage."

Salon's Glenn Greenwald has an explanation (3/23/09, ad-viewing required) for why he thinks that Howard Kurtz's belief that the image of corporate reporters as "just a bunch of cozy Washington insiders" is not "that big a deal"--because "there's such a built-in adversarial relationship between the press and the pols"--constitutes "an extremely funny joke today, showing why he is the 'media critic' for both the Washington Post and CNN":

That is some very penetrating media criticism there. The media and political leaders are at each other's throats so viciously, they have such sharply conflicting interests, that it's a wonder they can even be in the same room together without physical confrontation. For instance, it was the same Howie Kurtz who, in 2004, wrote this about what happened at his own newspaper:

Days before the Iraq war began, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus put together a story questioning whether the Bush administration had proof that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

But he ran into resistance from the paper's editors, and his piece ran only after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who was researching a book about the drive toward war, "helped sell the story," Pincus recalled. "Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper." Even so, the article was relegated to Page A17.

Kurtz's own paper also reported Tim Russert's policy of refusing to report anything said by government officials unless explicitly authorized by them to do so.

Buttressing his condemnation with many more examples of such "adversarial" reportage, Greenwald also updates his post with grim video footage of "the ugly weekend riot that nearly erupted as a result of the intractable media/politician animosity" on display at presidential candidate John McCain's barbecue for his "base."

Read the recent FAIR Media Advisory: "The Short, Happy Iraq War of Howard Kurtz" (3/20/09).

Howard Kurtz had Bernard Goldberg on his Reliable Sources show (CNN, 2/22/09), weeks after the erratic right-wing media critic blew off his show.  You could have had a better conversation about pro-Obama media bias with the drunk on the next barstool.

For example, when Kurtz says:

I think sometimes you're selective in your evidence. For example, you write about Deborah Howell; she's the former ombudsman at my newspaper, the Washington Post. You say, "She waited until after the election to write about the tilt on the Post op-ed page toward Barack Obama." But--and she did, but on August 3, Deborah Howell wrote about the huge imbalance in photos favoring Obama at the Washington Post. On August 17, she wrote that Obama had a 3-1 advantage over McCain in front page stories. So she didn't entirely wait until after the election.

...it's really not much of a response for Goldberg to say:

No. But this was the--this was the information that would have done us a --it didn't do us any good after the election, Howie. I mean, it was nice that she wrote it. It was nice that she acknowledged what just about everybody out in America already understood, that the media did side with one candidate over another.

And when Kurtz tells Goldberg:

You say that the media during the campaign didn't show enough interest in Obama's longtime relationship with the "unhinged," as you put it, Jeremiah Wright, but as you acknowledge in the book, the tapes of those "God damn America" sermons were first aired by ABC's Brian Ross, who is a card-carrying member of the mainstream media establishment. And that that story, it seemed to me, kind of dominated the campaign news for several weeks.

...Goldberg's response is: "It only dominated the campaign after the tapes came out. And the tapes came out way, way late in the campaign."  The story of Wright's sermons should have dominated the campaign before the tapes of the sermons came out?  Not to mention that nine months before the election is not exactly "way, way late in the campaign."

In the same column (2/16/09) that he cites Sam Donaldson's reputation as a "blowhard liberal," the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz has an item in which he complains that "the Vogue cover story on Michelle Obama, by editor at large André Leon Talley, is nothing if not laudatory." Kurtz writes:

The Talley article mentions briefly that Obama showed up "at a fundraiser I co-hosted last year." That would be a $1,000-a-head fundraiser--"An Evening With Michelle Obama"--also hosted by Vogue editor Anna Wintour and designer Calvin Klein.

Wouldn't the story have had more credibility if written by someone who hadn't helped the Obama campaign raise money?

Wouldn't Kurtz's criticism have more credibility if he acknowledged that fashion magazines are not exactly known for their hard-hitting attacks on the celebrities they profile?

Kurtz's subhead for the item--"Coziness in Vogue"--suggests that the article is a sign of the times, part of his ongoing "Obama Adulation Watch"...which he continues under that heading in the same column, with an item about a New York Times blogger who reports that women often dream about having sex with Barack Obama.

This kind of media criticism is barely above the level of Jonah Goldberg. If Kurtz is trying to evaluate what kind of honeymoon the press is giving Obama, shouldn't the fact that cable news allowed Republican lawmakers to dominate the debate over his stimulus plan carry more weight than the ethical lapses of Vogue?

Discussing the retirement of ABC's Sam Donaldson, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz writes (2/16/09):

Donaldson's detractors viewed him as a liberal blowhard, and there were certainly times when his mouth outran his brain.

I would certainly count FAIR as being among Donaldson's detractors, and we viewed him as someone who was frequently mistaken for being liberal because he shouted questions at Ronald Reagan. And the examples Kurtz gives of Donaldson's reporting--promoting a Colin Powell presidential bid, suggesting that Bill Clinton should resign over the Lewinsky scandal--do not exactly illustrate a progressive crusader.  Though Kurtz does report that Donaldson was proud of a report that tracked down a Nazi war criminal; maybe that makes him a liberal in Kurtz's book.

Courtesy of Ben Armbruster (Think Progress, 2/9/09), generally right-leaning media "critic" Howard Kurtz displays a total lack of self-reflection when, after discussing the sexism Katie Couric faced "as the first woman to anchor a network news program,"

Kurtz then asked Couric if her new hairstyle has something to do with her most recent successes:

KURTZ: We're going to put up some pictures of you over the years, and I'm going to ask you whether you think at all a factor in your recent success could be this new hairstyle.

Couric's response was sharp: "You know, you should ask Charlie Gibson about how he’s changed his part a little bit, or how Brian looks more tan on the air"--but who can tell if that jibe managed to pierce Kurtz's sometimes unreliable mind.