I realize that this is merely a drop in the bucket, but Howard Kurtz once again showed that his brief is defending the media rather than critiquing it, as the title of his Washington Post column claims.

In a chat today ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/06/01/DI2007060101431.html ) the first question he took was from Arlington, VA. The questioner expressed dismay at the media's intense coverage of reporters who got injured in Iraq, compared to the relative silence about injuries and fatalities suffered by US soldiers. Kurtz's reply, in total:

Howard Kurtz: If you had seen Kimberly Dozier's special or read my piece, you would know that she puts the emphasis on what happens to American troops, not on her injuries or the deaths of her two CBS colleagues. Yes, prominent network correspondents who are injured tend to get more attention than unknown soldiers, but both Dozier and Bob Woodruff have used their personal tragedies to train the spotlight back on the soldiers. Here's what Dozier, who had more than 25 operations after the bombing, told me:

"The importance of that day is not that we were there. We were there during what happens to soldiers 20 to 30 times a day. Everything that happened that day is the story of the U.S. military in Iraq."

As you probably noticed, Kurtz was being disingenuous. The questioner wasn't criticising the injured reporters; s/he was critiquing the rest of the media. Why did Kurtz chose to pretend otherwise?

I posted a comment immediately:

Mr. Kurtz, your response to Arlington, Va. begged the question. The questioner was not blaming the injured reporters for the skewed coverage; s/he was blaming the rest of the media, i.e. your beat.

Instead of responding, you used the injured reporters themselves as cover to avoid the issue. Could you respond to the question that was asked, please?

Needless to say, my comment did not meet Mr. Kurtz's high standards for response. Thank goodness he had time to address such important issues as large-breasted spammers on MySpace, his experiences wearing bell-bottomed jeans, the wackiness and irrelevance of Cindy Sheehan, a replacement for Don Imus, and the state of Stone Phillip's career.

Nice to know that Mr. Kurtz has his priorities - and his duties as America's most-respected media critic - in order!

Scientician: I am only allowed 1000 characters. But examples are easy to find. Take this example I saw the other day: http://mediamatters.org/items/200411220006

Of course, it is not false to claim Clinton committed a felony or perjury. It would only be false to claim he was convicted of such. There's a lot more, I see it every day. Here's a piece I wrote once about MM falsehoods: http://slashdot.org/~pudge/journal/132506

And yes, I take umbrage with Glenn: he misrepresented McConnell, blatantly. McConnell never implied that the law has never been amended, and in fact, he implied precisely the opposite when he said it is "essentially" the same in this regard. If he meant it had never been modified, he almost surely would not have used the word "essentially." As Glenn said in re Klein, how you report is important, and Glenn was simply wrong.

And I never advocated a single thing about throwing out old laws. Please save the straw man fallacies for someone else.

We have been told that we are at war. There are conventions which are supposed to govern the conduct of war. However, these conventions apparently do not apply because we are at war with 'Enemy Combatants' who don't fit into the Nation State soldier army model. And, because they don't fit, we don't have to follow the rules.

It seems to me that, by following this line of thought, we are losing whatever moral high ground is available.

When are we going to really focus on the causes of the conflict, the underlying ideas. Until we address the ideas we will never solve the problem, or end the war.

The Machiavellian cynic in me wonders whether, in fact, this is part of the strategy: create a war with no definable enemy, no obvious beginning or end and then you can do, pretty much, whatever you want.

To quote Elvis Costello:

'That could never happen here.

But, then again, it might.'

This is typical of the wingnut blogosphere.

Remember in 2004 when they ALL picked up on the Smear Boaters' "John Kerry was dishonorably/other than honorably discharged" meme? Even a couple of purported ex-JAG lawyers insisted the regulation cited in Kerry's discharge papers proved he was not honorably discharged. Granted, it was by way of that Pulitzer "nominee" fraud Thomas Lipscomb, but still:

http://www.nysun.com/article/4040

Of course no one - and I mean NO ONE - had any idea what the original regulation stated, as it had been superseded by another long ago.

If a single one of 'em - not to mention the Smear Boaters themselves - had bothered to look at the original regulation, they would have known there was nothing, absolutely nothing, amiss with Kerry's discharge.

As a matter of fact, someone bothered to get hold of the original regulation - BUPERSMAN 3830300 -and actually posted its contents, along with its date of inclusion in the personnel manual, on a wingnut message board before the election:

http://beldar.blogs.com/beldarblog/2004/10/rumor_mill_buzz.html

So it obviously wasn't that hard to find, eh? Evidently too much like doing actual research for the wingnuts, I guess.

Glenn, your post yesterday was the last straw for me about the sham that passes for discourse in this nation. The RWNM has powerful influence in formerly "neutral" MSM sites such as ABC, CBS, and, to a lesser extent, NBC. Fox, of course, is literally run by the RWNM. As a result, those who get their "news" from ABC, Fox, etc. and do not have access to the Internet have a completely screwed up view of the world. The RWNM is completely divorced from reality. Worse yet, reading your story reminded me of one of the "news stories" from the Fall of 2004, where Dan Rather was "axed" over a fake news story (concerning Bush's National Guard Service) that I believe was a clever plant from a RWNM nut.

We all desperately need to read Al Gore's "Assault on Reason," and contemplate how we can save the MSM from the RWNM assault on truth. Our nation's future depends on it.