Howard Kurtz is a smug little weasel

UPDATES: See end of post

This week on Reliable Sources he devoted nearly the entire program to Don Imus and the fallout. Imagine, the most important media news of the week was a mean remark a DJ made about college athletes.

Since disparaging college athletes is the worst crime in the world, I wonder why Kurtz focused on Imus instead of Nancy Grace? What happened to the Rutgers team was a cake walk compared to what the Duke lacrosse team went through. Nancy Grace was a part of that (KC Johnson lays out her sorry record here.)

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that Grace works for Time Warner just like Kurtz? It must be much easier to attack someone who works for a competitor.

Kurtz actually interviewed Tony Kornheiser about Imus and radio culture. Somehow he forgot to bring up TK's mocking attacks on innocent twelve year olds.

Oh yeah, Kurtz writes for the Washington Post and Kornheiser once worked there as well.

My bad. I plead guilty to having high expectations for a critic who is just another whore. Maybe we need a word for that. How about this? “Precioused”. As in:

In Durham the lax team got Nifonged, but the media was precioused when they launched a jihad on the word of a lying stripper.

UPDATE: Yeah, he really is a weasel. He offers up this gem in the Washington Post:

The three players were not choir boys -- the team had, after all, invited a pair of strippers to a midnight party -- but they hardly deserved the national scorn of being loudly trumpeted as accused rapists.

Two of the player-- Seligmann and Finnerty had nothing to do with hiring the stripper. All they were guilty of was going to a spring break party. Further, both left early (long before the dancers did). Finally, Seligmann is pretty much a choirboy. He had no arrests, good grades, a solid history of charity work, and character witnesses by the truckload.

Howie Kurtz. Weasel. No doubt about it.

UPDATE 2: Jane Hall and Neal Gabler made the same loathsome argument on Fox News Watch this weekend. I thought the job of media critics was to criticize the media, not offer lame excuses for them.

It is telling that this sort of blame the victim spin was reserved for only the lax players. No one noted this Phil Mushnick observation (made before Imus's remarks) when slobbering over the Rutgers basketball team:

ITEM: The ugliest win in NCAA tournament history?

Among the big stories from the women's side was Rutgers' upset of Duke on Sunday. With a second left and Rutgers up one, Duke's Lindsey Harding missed two free throws.

But the bigger story, one left mostly closeted, was that RU players, lined up in rebounding position, shouted out to one another - but toward Harding - to try to distract Harding as she was shooting those FTs.

Rutgers coach C. Vivian Stringer afterwards said she didn't approve of such conduct. "It's not something I would encourage," she told the Star-Ledger of New Jersey.
Her players, however, perhaps because they were raised on TV and marketing strategies that promoted unsportsmanlike behavior, saw nothing wrong with it. One even called it "normal." Really? When's the next brawl?

But, hey, if fans try to distract the opponents at the foul line, why shouldn't the players, especially those just a few feet from the shooter? Regardless, RU's behavior, Sunday, is not likely to make one of those NCAA image ads.

Nor did anyone raises questions about the maturity of a player who thought she was "scarred for life" by Imus.

Are reporters noting that Gov. Corzine was injured only because he was racing to a photo op with the Rutgers team and Imus? Is he any less of a vicitm because he broke the law and refused to wear a seatbelt?

Of course not. Those points are irrelevant to the main stories. Just as the behavior of some lax players was irrelevant to the main story of a false and malicious persecution of these three players.

Why is that hard for media critics and other pundits to understand?