The question Howie Kurtz couldn't answer

[BurtWorm]

Critiquing the Press

(Yeah, right! :eyes: )

Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 9, 2005; 12:00 PM


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2005/05/02/DI2005050201236.html


Here's the set-up to Howie's forum this week:

"Television producers love a good mystery, especially if it involves a missing young woman, scared relatives, a distraught fiance and 600 wedding guests. So the story of Jennifer Wilbanks, who disappeared just days before her wedding in Georgia, was made for TV. But when she told police she had concocted a kidnapping tale, did it produce mea culpas from the overheated cable TV producers and commentators who had been speculating about foul play and whodunit? Not a chance. They just switched from tragedy to farce, treating the turnabout as just another plot twist. In a piece for Sunday Outlook, It's to Laugh (or Cry) About, Post media reporter Howard Kurtz uses the Wilbanks case to analyze the current trend in cable and network TV news coverage."


Here was my question:


"How is this forum any less culpable than the networks re: Runaway Bride? In my opinion, the biggest media sin of the last week was one of omission rather than commission: the media were mostly silent about the memo that nearly ended Blair's prime ministership--and that may end it sooner than he wishes anyway. In Britain the memo was a smoking gun, proving to most voters' satisfaction that they were lied to because Bush was going to have the war whether anyone else liked it or not. I find it outrageous that American media are treating this as a British story, if they treat it at all.

"And now you're complicit, Mr. Kurtz. Or do you have any plans to look into the meaning of that memo and why it's being ignored in the US?"



Here's Howie's answer:

[Bunny]

1. Nicely done, BurtWorm.

I'm dying to see if Howie gets back to you...

[Old and In the Way]

2. Don't hold your breath.

He can't honestly answer that without indicting himself.

[spanone]

3. The fact that Howie does a show about shows from a cable 'news' source.

This makes him part of the problem, not part of the solution. Then Howie, the defender of freedom, went on to talk about whether Katie Couric was falling from grace with 'the people' as if Katie Couric were Walter Cronkite. Go away Mr. Curse, or Kurtz.