OK. Kitten in a box from Ezra Klein

Dylan Matthews on Ezra Klein's blog said it all. "you have to admire the sheer efficiency with which this kitten encounters a box, exhausts its possibilities, and then moves on to other ventures:"

The fiction of "Conservative Ideas."

Joe Klein is an early member of the media "Enough" club who has decided to quit covering up conservative crimes and idiocies. From his recent post:

neoconservatives style themselves as intellectuals, but they shy away from proper conversations about facts and ideas. Though some are erudite, and some even polite, their public face in magazines like the Standard and Commentary--with a few notable exceptions--is quite different: they are, at base, ideologues not intellectuals, propagandists not journalists, thugs not thinkers.

Once in a while Joe earns his pundit pay by wrapping the Truth up in an excellent phrase. This is one of those times.

Add Howard Kurtz to WaPo writers who won't report fairly on Democrats

Howard Kurtz is the Washington Post's writer covering the political media, and the WaPo does more of that coverage than any other news organization in America. That makes Howard Kurtz the most high profile media critic in the U.S.

On November 21st Joe Klein wrote a hit piece article in Time Magazine based on 'erroneous facts' - a polite term for lies Klein obtained from arch-conservative Republican Congressman Peter Hoekstra who was not named in Klein's article. Based on Hoekstra's lies, Klein labeled Democrats as "Soft on Terror." Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald promptly did some fact checking that showed what Klein wrote was, in fact, completely wrong. Klein essentially refused to correct his error and Time Magazine supported him. Media Matters has the story. Time's late and timid admission of error was so weak that Democratic members of Congress complained about the article and demanded equal time to rebut the malicious lies Klein had published. It was the most significant issue in the political media for months. Which brings us to Howard Kurtz and the Washington Post.

The issue was one in which a well-known reporter at the largest political publication in the U.S. reported lies handed him by an extremist Republican Congress who is a known enemy of the Democrats and used those Republican lies to slime the Democratic leadership in Congress. Klein and Time then dragged their feet and finally printed a half-hearted correction that corrected nothing in spite of overwhelming evidence that he was wrong. Howie didn't bother to even acknowledge the issue for weeks, even going so far as to trash can requests by numerous bloggers to report on this issue during his weekly online chat with readers at washingtonpost.com. He knew the issue was there, but he conspicuously ignored it for weeks, then when he finally commented it was so inconspicuous and lacking in substance that Glenn Greenwald reports having missed it even though he was looking for it.

But that's Howie for you. In spite of his claim that he is even-handed in his reporting, Howie only defends conservative Republicans. As Eric Boehlert at Media Matters for America reports, this is a pattern for Howard Kurtz.

But it wasn't just the tardiness that raised eyebrows. Kurtz's late coverage did not include a single link to any of Greenwald's detailed dissections of Klein's blatant miscue and Time's dishonest handling of the error. Second, Kurtz contacted Klein but never pressed him on a single fact. Instead, Kurtz simply relayed Klein's quote: "I made a mistake, I corrected it and it's over." (Trust me, Klein did not "correct" his mistake.) Third, even though Kurtz contacted Klein for a quote, he did not contact Greenwald. And fourth, Kurtz claimed it was "the liberal blogosphere" that was still upset about the Klein gaffe, when it fact it was members of Congress who, at that point, were making the most noise about Klein's column.

So Kurtz badly missed a big media story, what's the big deal, right? Truth is the episode mirrors a long pattern, which is why more and more prominent players on the left no longer consider Kurtz to be an honest broker -- because he remains chronically oblivious to breaking stories that have a strong progressive media angle. Yet simultaneously, Kurtz shows a chronic over-eagerness to amplify any minor media story being advanced by conservatives. Earlier this year I wrote that The Washington Post had a "crush" on right-wing bloggers; that love -- though perhaps unrequited -- remains strong today.

"There's much concern about his ideological biases intruding into his work," Markos Moulitsas, the founder of DailyKos, told me in an email. Noting Kurtz's tardiness to the Klein column, Moulitsas said "any 'media critic' ignoring that story -- and it was a long-percolating one over the span of several weeks, giving multiple avenues of entry for critics -- is certainly a 'media critic' not doing his or her job."

Kurtz denies the charge: "I'm a down-the-middle reporter who doesn't consider ideology in covering this beat. Unlike some of my critics, I don't have an agenda."

But consider just two recent media controversies (both initiated by Media Matters) that the usually prolific Kurtz also ignored at the Post.

The first was Fox News talker Bill O'Reilly telling his radio listeners that when visiting a famous soul food restaurant in Harlem that he "couldn't get over the fact" that the black-owned establishment was just like restaurants owned by whites. He also noted approvingly that "black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves."

The second was right-winger Rush Limbaugh characterizing members of the U.S. military who oppose the war in Iraq as "phony soldiers." When the controversy broke, Limbaugh then edited transcripts of his program before posting them online to try to obfuscate the context.

Combined, those two stories garnered nearly 900 mainstream media mentions, according to Nexis. Yet not once did Kurtz, the most high-profile media writer in the country, write about them in The Washington Post. Not once. Kurtz could have also covered the stories through his daily online column, where he links to prominent news and media news stories. But again, according to a search of Nexis, Kurtz never linked to a single story about the O'Reilly or Limbaugh controversies as they raged in real time.

I don't doubt that Howard Kurtz and his bosses at the Washington Post consider themselves professional journalist who are doing objective, or at least even-handed, reporting on the American political scene. But they're fooling themselves, and no one else. They have a pro-Republican and pro-conservative bias a mile wide. And they seem to ignore the liberal bloggers completely. Why? Do they see the real competition to dead tree journalism there?

See also:

• The Washington Post doesn't like or respect Democrats
• Journalistic professionalism and complaints from the blogosphere
• Hillary is treating the media as hostile - good move, they ARE hostile..
  
• The 'media' has it in for Edwards, as they did for Gore. Why?

'Serious' people are the inside-the-beltway aristocracy

Glenn Greenwald discusses what it takes to be considered a 'serious person' in today's hothouse Washington, D.C. pundit climate.

Then, Joe Klein, himself a well-known 'serious person' but more importantly, one who bestows that accolade on others, responds to Glenn. He explains what he thinks he means by the term 'a serious person.'

To my mind, being a "serious person" means the following: you study the facts on the ground, you study the history, you take into account opinions on all sides--not just your side--and then you come to a conclusion. Essentially, that's what I try to do, and also the people I admire across the political spectrum (including many who reside in the blogosphere).

But that is not, in my opinion, the way he uses the term. When he says someone is 'a serious person' he is saying that they have a well-known reputation for deep and long-term involvement in what could be considered serious issues. Those are, of course, issues of war and peace and in legislation on well-known very important domestic issues.

Such people are normally found only in Washington, D.C. and are well-known to the other 'serious' people who reside and operate there. An MD and small-state governor who runs for President and claims that the Washington, D.C. 'serious people' are badly infected with insider bias and group-think cannot be considered 'a serious person.'

Joe's description of the alleged characteristics of 'a serious person' would be pretty good if he actually checked for those characteristics before he bestowed the title 'a serious person' on to someone, but Joe doesn't do that. He operates on gut instinct and determines whether someone is part of the insider Washington, D.C. aristocracy, and on that basis bestows the title 'a serious person' on them. Along with that title also goes the presumption that 'a serious person' has "a well-known reputation for deep and long-term involvement in what could be considered serious issues."

The possession of those characteristics is presumed to accompany membership in the Washington, D.C. aristocracy. No one from outside the aristocracy who dares to attack the aristocracy can be presumed to have those characteristics, so they cannot be considered to be 'serious people' unless they adopt the group biases and conventional wisdom of the inside-the-beltway serious people. You cannot be part of the aristocracy if you aren't well-known to the rest by reputation (and preferred, by family) and if you are attacking the conventional wisdom of the aristocracy. You have to behave like the aristocrats to be one of them. Only then are you presumed to be a person who has "a well-known reputation for deep and long-term involvement in what could be considered serious issues."


So of course, Glenn Greenwald responds to Joe's reply. He adds detail, but I like my response a bit better.