Laughable Howard Kurtz bit #1:

When Adam Moss put "The Sex Diaries" on the cover of his magazine — explicit jottings from such hot- to-trot folks as "The Polyamorous Paralegal" and "The Trader Who Will Fly for Sex" — it hardly seemed like a subject fit to print for the New York Times.

Yet days after the late-October story, Times columnist David Brooks was soon applying erudite analysis to how "the diarists are often texting multiple possible partners in search of the best arrangement."

Imagine that: Sex, right here in New York City. And for the salacious topic of "sex" to find its way into the august pages of the New York Times—well, it's enough to make a professional media critic palpitate.

Laughable Howard Kurtz bit #2:

Moss, 52, wields that asphalt-jungle perspective, but doesn't hit the Manhattan social circuit so lavishly chronicled by the magazine. "Adam is a workaholic," says political columnist John Heilemann. "You won't see him at Michael's schmoozing."

With the exception, of course, of the schmoozing at Michael's, and the schmoozing at Michael's, and the various parties. But we see how you could miss those.

Real journalism!

Balloon Juice's John Cole needs to stop reading Twitter—as do we all—because he finds things like this there:

Now that's a story. If Obama has lost the backing of the man who spent a full year and $346 million trying to prevent him from becoming president, then how can he govern?

And this:

It's an intriguing theory. We're skeptical, but since Kurtz is paid considerable sums by the Post and CNN for his deep knowledge and impeccable instincts when it comes to analyzing the media business, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

The skit comes to us by way of Kansas City Star TV critic Aaron Barnhart, who credits one of his readers for picking up on it. It showed Letterman in one of those Geico ads where a wad of money with eyeballs follows people around to the tune of Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me." Letterman notices the eyeballs on his desk, picks up a book, and smashes them. Blood spills out from beneath the book, the end. (Barnhart's YouTube page, where he posted the video, is here.)

It's sort of an odd skit to air the day before the arrest of a man who showed up outside Letterman's home in the early morning hours and threatened to reveal intimate details about his life if he didn't pay up. But as tempting as it is to believe that Letterman was acting out his revenge fantasies on his own show and sending a coded warning to his tormentor, we have to agree with Barnhart's conclusion that the skit is almost certainly a lovely coincidence: The extortion plot was closely held information at World Wide Pants, and it's highly unlikely that staffers were tossing ideas about it around the writer's room.

What isn't highly unlikely, however, is that the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz would pen a scolding and schoolmarmish column arguing that Letterman has gotten a pass from the press for dipping his pen in the company ink. Lo and behold:

If Letterman were the chief executive of a defense contractor, instead of a TV production company, would the media critics be so quick to let him skate on sleeping with the help?

You know, he's got a point. What if Letterman were a Catholic priest? You think Monsignor Letterman would get such soft coverage if he were sleeping with a nun? Or what if he were Stephanie Birkitt's father? Kurtz's incisive counterfactual has exposed the media-critic punditocracy for the hypocrites they are, because they insist on treating David Letterman as a private citizen who wasn't elected and receives no taxpayer dollars and broke no laws and wasn't married at the time the affairs were alleged to have happened and therefore was sadly free to do with his dick as he pleased, instead of treating him like a defense contractor, which would be much more satisfying for Howie Kurtz.

Radio host Kurt Andersen was practically seduced by the First Lady.

The table manners of the Chicago Tribune's Bill Daley offended someone.

The Huffington Post's Matthew Palevsky filed some citizen journalism about his flight.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Micki Maynard would like you to know her New York Times podcast is badass.

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post explained DC's bewildering lingo to the plebes.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Howard Kurtz wonders: Can black ladies cover Michelle Obama fairly, or might they be biased for her, because... you know. You know. Howie himself is careful to prove that the premise of this story that he wrote is stupid. Another wasted day, Howie.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Rupert Murdoch says he is categorically not thinking about buying the New York Times. This rumor originated with Michael Wolff, so we'll believe Rupert for the time being. OR WILL WE? We will.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Here's how ABC News reporter Jeffrey Kofman landed the first US network interview with the president of Honduras, just after the coup: He "walked right up to the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa... [showed] his ID and about five minutes later, he entered the inner sanctum and sat down for an interview with Micheletti." Journalism! Who knew?

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The very latest on the Washington Post's disastrous email offering cheerful access to editorial staff to corporate sponsors for the low price of $25,000: the paper's canceled these proposed 'Salon' events, the ombud calls it a "public relations disaster," and the newsroom says it was entirely in the dark until the scandal broke this morning. Still to come: much, much crowing from Politico, ad nauseum.

The Huffington Post being called on at Obama pressers has been a great source of crunchiness! To the media, of course, because the general public could honestly give a shit. When the awesomely named young'un Nico Pitney got called on by Obama at a recent press conference, he was ready with a question from Real Live Iranians that he had asked for online previous to the press conference. Dana Milbank wrote a column calling out the dog-and-pony that was said presser as "The Obama Show." Arianna Huffington then weighed in, saying that Milbank's got his facts "all wrong."

Before defending the fact that it was choreographed (N.B. A win-win for Obama: they care about theater/the arts!) he goes out of his way to call Milbank "pathetic" for asking Obama about how he looks in a bathing suit or something. Then Milbank lays into Pitney for being such a phony. Howard Kurtz tries to moderate the table but mostly just tries not to laugh joyously at both of them. The entire thing is just awesome, because they're both right and they both just lay into each other. It's like watching a boxing match where every savage, brutal punch lands squarely in the face of its intended target. Oh, and Pitney basically calls Milbank a jealous bitch. And: as it turned out, Milbank supposedly called Pitney a "dick" shortly after the segment finished.

In other news, whenever I see people on TV yelling at each other, I can't help but think of this:

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Further reading: Michael Calderone at Politico goes all TEAM HUFFPO. Ben Smith at Politico was all TEAM HUFFNO.

Previously: Barack Obama Calls On Huffington Post Again.

[Awesome cat video via Videogum.]

On Reliable Sources today, Kurtz went after blogger Perez Hilton for being a big angry gay who pestered the nice pretty pageant contestant with a pointless question about her "individual view" that homosexual marriage should be illegal, because the Bible said so.

Hilton replied, sensibly, that Miss USA should be able to answer a civil rights question without saying hugely offensive/moronic things ("opposite marriage??"). But Kurtz kept insisting she's just a beauty pageant contestant who shouldn't have to answer political questions.

The Miss USA organization would seem to disagree. It says its contest is about "humanitarian goals" and improving "the lives of others," and it wouldn't have appointed a gay male judge if it wanted a simple looks contest.

Maybe the group should show Kurtz and Lauer exactly how it evaluates women on criteria beyond their appearance. The guys might learn something!

Except for the part where he calls it "smart and substantive," Kurtz makes a well-known case against Politico:

Politico, the Web operation and newspaper launched more than two years ago by two Washington Post veterans, is actually a smart and substantive site. But in its relentless pursuit of traffic — not all that different from the networks' relentless pursuit of ratings — Politico sometimes plays up the novel, the fleeting, the provocative take that briefly titillates but evaporates within hours. And that has some critics accusing the site of dumbing down the art of reporting.

True enough. ("Sometimes"?) But Politico doesn't "play up" novel takes, they invent untrue stories out of thin air. The facts are (usually) true, but the sin is in making stories not out of the facts themselves, but out of the anticipated reaction on the part of partisan institutions, like Drudge and the Republican Party, to the facts when presented in a certain light. There's nothing "novel," "fleeting," or "provocative" about the simple fact that Barack Obama laughed during an interview with 60 Minutes. The story Politico pushed in that instance was premised on the idea that Drudge et. al. could be counted on to disingenuously make something out of that laughter, and Politico was happy to serve up the ball.

And Kurtz has batted those balls around plenty! He lingered on the novel, fleeting, and provocative invention that Gen. Wesley Clark viciously attacked John McCain's sacred service to his country last year by maintaining, in response to a direct question, that being a pilot is not a qualification for the presidency. He blamed John Kerry for the faux outrage over his "botched joke" about military veterans, a bullshit Politico-esque story if ever there was one.

Kurtz's complaint is more that Politico tries to write headlines that will grab traffic, which, hey—what are you gonna do? The Washington Post could stand to gain some more readers for it's substantive, serious coverage of the political scene.

Take the paper's Bo series for instance. The Post's coverage of Bo, which was supposed to be a silver-plate Post exclusive, handed out by the White House in exchange for the Post's silence on a gardening story that had been promised to the New York Times, is an exercise in the sort of sober, non-audience-generating reportage that is currently rocketing the newspaper industry to new heights of profitability. Post reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia is obviously proud of his work on the beat:

Let's follow the trail.

The Obama puppy trail.

Why? Because it is our duty.

Don't be ashamed, Manuel. It is what it is.

For the second time in a week, Smith claimed Gawker and PerezHilton.com were run without "editors, publishers, lawyers," even though this site has all three, the editors being listed right on the front page.

Not that it has any bearing, as Smith claims, on factual accuracy: CNN and Tina Brown's The Daily Beast both have the full complement of structural gatekeepers listed by Smith, and both left Smith's error unchallenged.

We will give the cranky octogenarian credit for learning one trick of the Web trade: Trying to start a dustup with a much larger competitor in an obvious bid for attention. Sometimes it works!

(Video via Huffington Post)

From a transcript of the CNN show:

KURTZ: And Katie Couric joins me now by phone from New York. And Katie, we appreciate you calling in. You were so anxious to be on the program that you called in early. We had to call you back.
COURIC: Well, I didn't want to be late, Howie. I got nervous, because I've been on the receiving end of late calls, so I didn't want to do that to you.

KURTZ: Yes.

COURIC: But it's nice to talk to you.

KURTZ: Same here.

What, she has enough time to call in early, but she can't be bothered to get in makeup and have her driver take her to a studio? We'd go on, but we wouldn't want to be one of those bad critical people Couric complained to Kurtz about:

KURTZ: Some of the early criticism, you know, turned kind of personal, and is a woman really right for evening news anchor? And I just wonder whether that was a painful period for you at all?

COURIC: I mean, you know, listen, it's not a lot of fun being pummeled in the press. But on the other hand, I've always had enough confidence in my abilities and my work to know that sometimes there are larger issues at work here about the role of women in society and, you know, sort of — I didn't really take it that personally. I think that there are a lot of unhappy, sort of insecure, vitriolic people out there, and I always sort of feel bad for them, that this is how they spend their time.

Instead, we will leave you with this bit of repartée:

KURTZ: While we have you, we're seeing you on "The Today Show."

Oh, that's an interesting one. You'll have to see a tape of this.

COURIC: I was pregnant. I actually am watching these.

KURTZ: OK. You've got the TV on.

COURIC: Yes. I kind of like the John King shot of me feeding him grapes the best.

KURTZ: Yes. Do you have an explanation for that before we go?

COURIC: I don't really remember, but I do remember being over there with John. And he's a great reporter, and I'm so happy for his success.

Anyone catch the grape-feeding photo in question? If so, please send it in.

(Still via Huffington Post)

New Yorker pop-music critic Sasha Frere-Jones had an ALL-CAPS FREAKOUT about bus fare.

Washington Post media reporter Howie Kurtz didn't worry about turning into a thermometer.

Former Huffington Post editor (and Rex Sorgatz conquest) Rachel Sklar looked for an inaugural roommate.

Matt Cooper, Condé Nast fancypants turned grubby blogger, had trouble using Twitter.

Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Gregory Korte had other things on his mind, like an upcoming work furlough.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us their username.

His magazine, big national popular Time Inc. owned thing that it is, can't handle its press as well as lil' old Angelina Jolie. The Times piece was basically an unveiling of celebrity glossy coverage policy that everyone knew already. People is always nice to everyone. Booooring. But all they gave was one little comment denying the thrust of the article. Jolie should teach a class at the Learning Annex. "How to Leverage Your Coverage" or something. Hackett could learn a thing or two.

The whole RS segment is embedded below and is kind of silly except for two things: First, fun archival footage of a CNN Angelina Jolie interview where she raps an interviewer on the knuckles for asking about her rumored pregnancy. And second, Kurtz calling Jolie "the wild, slutty wife of Billy Bob Thornton."

Wild and slutty, baby. Wild and slutty.

There is always a level of excitement when a new president is coming to town — new aides to profile, new policies to dissect, new family members to follow. But can anyone imagine this kind of media frenzy if John McCain had managed to win?

Uh... good point? No, wait; bad point. "The audience cheered when the hero won. But would they have cheered as much if they villain had one?" No Howie. No they wouldn't. And have you considered, Howie, what Rupert Murdoch said the other day about your industry?

"The complacency [in newsrooms] stems from having enjoyed a monopoly—and now finding they have to compete for an audience they once took for granted. The condescension that many show their readers is an even bigger problem. It takes no special genius to point out that if you are contemptuous of your customers, you are going to have a hard time getting them to buy your product. Newspapers are no exception."

The funny thing is that Howie does have the ghost of a point here! He's just two weeks late in realizing it (beaten by the internet). He's also decrying the media giving its audience what it wants. He's like Rupert Murdoch's quote come to life! And useless as always, terrified of being accused of "liberal bias" as he is. It's a good thing none of this "mythmaking" business went on with George W. Bush, 9/11 Hero. [WP]

[Eric] Deggans, who heads the local chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists, says television shows love to book African Americans who take on the Illinois Democrat. "I don't think it's going to be hard for black journalists to be critical of Obama, because once they are, media opportunities abound," he says.

Conservative commentator Amy Holmes, a former GOP Senate aide, says the press will be tempted to portray an "embittered, embattled Republican minority" as "thwarting the will of Barack Obama. Republicans will be going into a media environment of cheerleading for Obama that will characterize the opposition as nasty rather than reasonable."

Yes, the Black Journalists association head says black anti-Obama voices will be over-represented in the media, and, without coming to any conclusion whatsoever on the veracity of that remark, Kurtz just mindlessly moves on to an unrelated statement from Amy Holmes, the former Bill Frist speechwriter. Holmes is a total sweetheart, and also, yes, a prominent black conservative, criticizing Obama in the media.

But daytime and late-night shows have been an underrated factor in this campaign, and an undeniable advantage for Obama. Ellen DeGeneres, David Letterman and panelists on "The View" all confronted McCain, while Obama has basically joked and danced his way through such appearances, including a "Daily Show" stint last week in which Jon Stewart asked him about "the whole socialism/Marxist thing." If anyone doubts there is a liberal entertainment establishment, it has been vividly on display.

Yes, that is right. John McCain, who barbecued with Rachel Ray and did Leno and Letterman and who campaigned with The View's Elisabeth Hasselbeck, is a victim of the liberal entertainment establishment. Poor Senator John McCain, who held the record for most Daily Show appearances ever, was victimized by mean questions on the talk shows he kept appearing on, over and over again, while Obama just shucked and jived—sorry, "joked and danced"—his way to victory, thanks to the liberal bias of Ellen, who was mean to John because he wants to make her marriage illegal.

On the day in which the story was McCain's media appearances, in a campaign that has hinged on those appearances before (he got grilled by Letterman because he ditched Letterman, remember), of course Howard is talking about how Obama got it easy on The View and McCain didn't (except for the first time he did The View, when he did get it easy). And oh, he was obviously not challenged on Leno, because Leno never challenges anyone.

But Ellen and Joy Behar and Dave were mean to John McCain, so the world is unfair.

(This is followed by an item about how there is a double standard because Sarah Palin is accused of hiding from the press even though recently she sat down with Brian Williams, Elizabeth Vargas, Jill Zuckman, and, snort, Sean Hannity [near-daily!]. She's also sat down with her traveling press corps "on several occasions." But mean Joe Biden is "hiding" from the press because he's only on tv multiple times every day, having done 211 interviews with local outlets, morning shows, the New York Times, and CBS, but not his traveling press corps. How is this a double standard? Well, there's a question mark in Kurtz's subhead so maybe he meant it's not a double standard, because to declare one when the evidence suggests an apparent single standard would of course be merely parroting a misleading GOP talking point and fair old Howard Kurtz would never do that.)

My point isn't that these were all terrible mistakes, although some of them may have been. It's that these strategic moves would look very different if Obama was on the verge of losing, while McCain would be garnering praise for, say, throwing himself into the bailout negotiations and rolling the dice with Palin. When a candidate is winning, the media treat his tactical decisions as sheer brilliance. When a candidate is faltering, not so much.

Do you see how much sense that makes? When a candidate is winning, the media makes the campaign look competent and smart! When a candidate is losing, the media keeps talking about the campaign's mistakes! It's almost like the media is biased against tactics that don't work? For some reason, things that get results are better than things that don't! Crazy!

The most negative element of the Palin coverage involved scrutiny of her record as Alaska governor, with 64 percent of the stories carrying a negative tone and just 7 percent positive. The coverage of her interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson was a wash, but stories about her subsequent sitdown with CBS's Katie Couric were 57 percent negative and 14 percent positive.

Are journalists actually supposed to write one nice story about how totally pretty Governor Palin is for every piece they file on how she's a petty tinpot PTA mom-from-hell who somehow manages to abuse what little power the governor of Alaska actually has? What purpose does this study serve, Project for Excellence in Journalism, except to encourage John McCain to think it's not fair and it's not his fault and everyone was mean to him?

The fact of the matter is regular work-a-day journalists, even the high-falutin well-off name ones, don't get finance. Because no one really gets finance besides financiers, and journos are all soft-sciences arts majors. Math is hard! Even now they don't "get" it (though everyone's on the tail end of their "conversant at cocktail parties" crash course, and it shows). Honestly, we spent a couple years studying for BFA, of course we have no fucking clue what happened here.

And as both media producers and media consumers, we're reasonably more conversant on many national public interest issues than Joe Sixpack Americans. And yes, in 2004 when the SEC decided to allow investment banks to self-regulate themselves we heard about it on Kos or something and were outraged and all that. But:

Yet major newspapers did not report on the voluntary program's adoption in 2004, which the Times now trumpets as a turning point. (The Journal ran an eight-paragraph piece on Page C4.)

And honestly there were so many other things to be outraged about in 2004!

The fact that serious business and finance journalism is written in opaque for-experts-by-experts style certainly helped the crisis along. The fact that the first real attempt at populist entertaining business journalism was the fact-free Bud Lite-sponsored happy hour that is Fox Business is obviously indicative of the larger problem here, which is that no one understood that the nation's economy was built on a house of cards except for the people who didn't care, the people who constructed the house of cards, and Ron Paul.

So we understand the crisis through an unhelpful lens of politics—we can explain the political machinations behind the bailout bill, yes, but is it good or bad policy? Paul Krugman says it's bad-but-necessary, or something. What a cop-out!

The People are actually to blame, yes; the stupid people who didn't pay attention to the terms of their loans and lived outside their means and gambled everything away while gorging themselves on bacon-wrapped shrimp at Red Lobster. Except who were the ones pushing the "ownership society," giving huge incentives for homeownership to people who shouldn't own homes, never providing anything but misleading information, convincing themselves that housing prices would never ever ever fall? Both political parties, two presidents, and all the respectable press. There was a dereliction of duty by everyone in the nation responsible for serving the public trust, which certainly used to mean journalists too.

It took Time until March of this year to explain credit default swaps, but at least they did explain it in March. And now we're probably in for another corrective period, in which like after the Lewinsky free-for-all and the credulous lead-up to the Iraq war, the press will spend a self-flagellating year promising to do better in the future. When honestly all they need to do is edit the business section so we can understand it and move that shit to the front page every now and then.

"I'm very sorry to say, it's come to this: can you confirm on the record that Trig Palin is Sarah Palin's biological son? . . . Since this is a crazy idea, it should be easy for you or someone to let me know, the most popular one-man political blog site in the world, what the truth is."

HAH. The most popular one-man political blog site in the world wants the truth, Senator!

The McCain campaign did not answer his question. Instead, they forwarded the emails to Washington Post media "critic" or whatever Howard Kurtz! They knew he'd come down hard on Sullivan for such impudence. Or at least they knew he'd print the emails and ask Sullivan for a comment and let them have a comment and then not come to any conclusions about anything, because he's Howard Kurtz.

If we know anything about spotting liars—and we've watched a lot of Columbo—we know now conclusively that Sarah Palin did not give birth to Trig, because they didn't deny or confirm anything and instead attacked the questioner.

Kurtz: "Sullivan, one of the earliest bloggers, has been on a tear about Palin lately, calling her 'a compulsive, repetitive, demonstrable liar.'" Then of course instead of listing a single example of one of those lies and saying whether or not it counts as a lie Kurtz moves on entirely to documenting a "veiled debate" between Sullivan and Ross Douthat. Howard Kurtz, everyone! (This is why we're never invited on his show.)

Baby Talk [WP]

I mean, McCain has been really good about painting Obama as this lightweight, using the word "celebrity" as a pejorative. They don't want to have a boomerang effect. They don't want that to come back on Sarah Palin, and people say, yes, she looks good in a bikini clutching an AK-47, but is she equipped to run the country?

Kurtz never corrected Ogunnaike, on either the fake picture or on the even more absurd suggestion that some critical mass of people think the VP candidate looked good in it.

Next on CNN: Whether Palin alienated conservative voters by faking her own pregnancy.

[Reliable Sources]