On Kurtz: A Letter to the WaPo Ombudsman

Update [2005-4-12 18:27:18 by Armando]: Edited for style by sinistral, with one overrule by Armando (Right Wing - yeah it may be grammatically incorrect, but it feels right to me.)

To: Michael Getler, Ombudsman for the Washington Post

Re: Reporting by Mr. Howard Kurtz, Media Reporter for the Washington Post

Dear Mr. Getler:

As a reader of the Washington Post, I wish to communicate to you my concerns regarding the reporting of Mr. Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post media reporter. Specifically, my concern is related to Mr. Kurtz's negligent performance in covering a false defamatory report from the extreme Right Wing website Powerline regarding the talking points memo circulated by the office of Republican U.S. Senator Mel Martinez on the political benefit to Republicans in passing the Terri Schiavo law. In short, Mr. Kurtz's work was appalling.

Let's review Mr. Kurtz's work on the matter:

On March 30, 2005, Mr. Kurtz wrote a column titled "Doubts Raised on Schiavo Memo." In the column, Mr. Kurtz "reports":

Fresh from declaring victory over CBS News and its discredited National Guard memos about President Bush, some of the same bloggers are raising questions about a strategy memo, first reported by ABC News and The Washington Post, that cast the Schiavo right-to-die case as a partisan opportunity for Republicans to stick it to Democrats. "Fake but Accurate Again?" says the Weekly Standard headline on an article by John Hinderaker, an attorney and conservative blogger who had challenged the CBS documents.

While there is no hard evidence that the memo is fake, there are several strange things about it, including the basic fact that no one seems to know who wrote it and that the noncontroversial part of it is lifted from a Republican senator's press release.

(Emphasis mine)

This is shoddy journalism to say the least. Mr. Kurtz implies there is evidence that the memo is fake, that no one knows who wrote the memo and that it is strange that some parts coincide with language used in a Republican press release. Each claim was false when Mr. Kurtz wrote the column.

There was, and is, no evidence that the memo is fake. In fact, someone did know who wrote the memo, and it is likely that many people knew. Furthermore, it simply is not strange that language from the memo was in a GOP press release; in a sane world, that fact serves to corroborate the story that the memo was from Republicans.

The source of Mr. Kurtz's problem is, in fact, his "source," the extreme Right Wing partisan John Hinderaker of Powerline:

"There's nothing on the face of the document to identify a source -- not only is it unsigned, there's no letterhead, no nothing," Hinderaker said yesterday. "This is literally a piece of paper with stuff typed on it that could have been written by anyone."

Why does Mr. Kurtz report on Mr. Hinderaker's unsupported and unfounded allegations? This is news? Throw it against the wall and see if it sticks is the new standard? Surely not.

It gets worse. Mr. Kurtz repeats a defamatory falsehood that the memo was a dirty trick by Democrats:

In the flood of commentary after the reports, some bloggers even speculated that the memo could have been a Democratic dirty trick. ... In his Weekly Standard article, Hinderaker, who writes for the blog Powerline, pointed out some of the memo's other oddities. It contained several typographical errors, such as misspelling Schiavo's first name as "Teri," and identified the Senate measure by the wrong bill number. ... "The content of the memo tells me it wasn't prepared to benefit the Republican Party, it was prepared to benefit the Democratic Party," Hinderaker said.

Thus, Mr. Kurtz acted as stenographer for the irresponsible and extreme Mr. Hinderaker, instead of doing his job as a reporter. Is this journalism? Surely not.

On April 4, Mr. Kurtz repeated the charges, writing that:

The flap about a Washington Post report on an unsigned strategy memo in the Terri Schiavo case, which the paper said was "distributed to Republican senators," isn't going away.

(Emphasis mine)

At that time, the only publications covering the story were extreme Right Wing blogs such as Powerline and Michelle Malkin and the extreme Right Wing newspaper The Washington Times. Where exactly had the story gone? I repeat, the only mainstream media covering the story was Mr. Howard Kurtz, in his Washington Post column and on his CNN television show.

Of course, Mr. Kurtz's stenographer work for the Powerline blog came crashing down on April 7 when the Washington Post reported that the memo was produced by the office of Senator Mel Martinez. What is most ironic in this comedy of gross negligence by Mr. Kurtz is his decision to accept the speculations of the extreme Right Wing partisan blog Powerline over the reporting done by his own Washington Post colleague. Is this journalism? Surely not.

Mr. Kurtz's has made an irresponsible habit of accepting as newsworthy the wild accusations of the extreme Right Wing Powerline blog. This is in sharp contrast to Mr. Kurtz's hostile and inaccurate reporting of stories emanating from Left Wing blogs regarding the strange (to use Mr. Kurtz's word) career of James Guckert, who writes under the pseudonym Jeff Gannon.

Mr. Kurtz doubted every story, even when fully documented; challenged the newsworthiness of the story, though it received wide coverage in almost all media outlets; and distorted the issues presented. Instead of focusing on the real story, how a character like Gannon could possibly have gotten a White House press pass, Mr. Kurtz instead treated the issue as a personal attack on a real reporter. To say the least, Mr. Kurtz's work was dishonest. If I were to follow the method of the Powerline blog, I might even speculate and assert that Mr. Kurtz was deliberately misinforming the readers of the Washington Post from some ulterior motive. But that would be irresponsible of me and I, for one, will not stoop to that level.

Instead, I charge Mr. Kurtz with gross incompetence as a journalist. I believe Mr. Kurtz has much to answer for regarding his performance as media reporter for the Washington Post. As Ombudsman, I believe this deserves your attention.