Considering where we currently stand in the CIA leak investigation...indictments against Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice, Rove still under investigation, Cheney's deep involvement starting to be revealed...Howard Kurtz has decided that it's time to look at journalistic behavior. Reasonable enough when you consider the nearly criminal lack of reporting done by our media these past several years...but Howard has a different take on it:
Now that an indictment has reached the highest level of the White House for the first time since Watergate, journalists face a minefield of potentially explosive questions: Are they enjoying a bit too much the spectacle...What happened to the normal journalistic skepticism toward a single-minded special prosecutor, as was on display when Ken Starr was pursuing Bill Clinton?
Apparently Mr. Kurtz inhabited a different universe during the Starr years, because far from displaying any skepticism towards Mr. Starr, the media breathlessly reported every illegal leak from his office...ad nauseum.
Moving from delusional revisionist history,
Kurtz opines that the media, bloggers and partisans (still enjoying the story too much) are "using" the outing of Valerie Wilson to attack Bush
and Judith Miller:
Perhaps most important, are reporters, commentators, bloggers and partisans using the outing of Valerie Plame as a proxy war for rehashing the decision to invade Iraq? The vitriol directed at New York Times reporter Judith Miller, whether deserved or not, seems motivated as much by her role in touting the administration's erroneous WMD claims as in her decision to be jailed, at least for a time, to protect Libby.
Some might say that what is most important is that the administration illegally outed a CIA operative while smearing a person who could expose how they misled this country into war...Kurtz has other concerns:
In short, the leak prosecution is shaping up as a test of media fairness and responsibility in a polarizing age when many people on the left and right think the news business is hopelessly biased.
This is true, although not in the sense that Kurtz seems to mean it, because if this is a taste of how Kurtz intends to cover the story, he's already failed the test.
Kurtz blathers on, but what he says really doesn't matter in the face of this excerpt that stands out as a testament to the idiocy that is Howard Kurtz:
The underlying issue in the Plame debacle -- the alleged manipulation of intelligence used to justify a war and retaliating against a critic, Joe Wilson, who challenged that effort -- is arguably more important than the Clinton-era debates over whether oral sex was sex.
Arguably? Words fail...