Glenn Greenwald: Howie Kurtz, Shailagh Murray, and the vapid, petty Beltway media mind

Howie Kurtz, Shailagh Murray, and the vapid, petty Beltway media mind

(updated below - Update II)

The job of Howard Kurtz as the "media critic" for The Washington Post and CNN is to shed light on how our media functions. Kurtz actually did a superb job of this in his column yesterday, although it was completely unintentional.

Kurtz responded to a post by Digby, in which Digby explained the perfect coordination between the right-wing gossip-mongers who feed the gossip-hungry press an endless supply of petty, vapid personal smears that dominate our political discourse -- all in lieu of any meaningful coverage of anything that actually matters. As Digby wrote, quoted by Kurtz:

And after watching them for the past two decades very closely, I think it's obvious that what interests the media more than anything is access and gossip and vicious little smears piled one atop the other. And why not? They are easy to report, require no mind numbing shuffling of financial reports or struggling through arcane policy papers. In fact, the press has made a virtue of the simple-mindedness by calling what used to be known as gossip, "character issues", which are used to stand in for judgment about policy.

The press, therefore, will go to great lengths to protect the people who give them what they crave, most of whom happen to be Republicans since character smears are their very special talent. There was a reason why Rove and Libby used "the wife sent him on a boondoggle" line. Stories about Edwards and his hair and Hillary and her cold, calculating cleavage are the coin of the realm.

Kurtz simply can't have this. One of the Central Religious Principles of Beltway journalists is "equivalence" -- always to insist that everything is the same between the two sides regardless of whether it actually is. To fulfull this craving for "balance," this is how Kurtz "refuted" Digby's point:

I agree that leakers often get to set the story line, but I also know that Democrats are not unfamiliar with the practice. (Remember the Bush DUI leak just before the 2000 election?) And those who leaked information about domestic surveillance, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons also had an impact.

For the moment, leave aside the fact that Kurtz is so desperate to defend Republican operatives that he just recklessly asserts things as fact here even though he has no idea whether they are true. Kurtz has absolutely no idea who leaked the NSA story to Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau and whether they are "Democrats." The same is almost certainly true for Dana Priest's sources for her CIA "black site" story, whom Priest described as "U.S. and foreign officials" and "current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents" -- not "Democrats."

more...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/?last_story=/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/20/kurtz_murray/

to McCain's (supposed) black lovechild or Hillary's (Supposed) lesbian affairs?
When the truth comes out it embarrasses the radical Reich.
When they let some lies slip it is just SOP.