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?

Is Brian Williams going nuts?

How else to explain this?

You’re going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe,” said Williams. “All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I’m up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn’t left the efficiency apartment in two years."

Williams compared this to a New Yorker cartoon featuring two dogs sitting in front of a computer and one says to the other: “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”

"On the Internet, no one knows if you’ve been to Ramadi or you’ve just been to Brooklyn and just have an opinion about Ramadi," said Williams.

Can he really take himself that seriously? Is he really that pompous?

His credentials, after all, begin with looking good on camera, wearing a suit well, and reading off a teleprompter. The most of the rest of his career is just business travel.

Shorter Brian Williams:

I read words into a camera in Ramadi for a few days, RESPECT MY AUTHORITY.

In the wake of Imus, i have to note that 1. "Vinny in the Bronx" sounds like there could some ethnic humor violations going on here, and 2. Williams was a frequent Imus guest.

Finally, isn't the whole bloggers and bathrobes just so, 2004?

Duke lacrosse: Standing to criticize

Tery Moran is not along in his moronic attempt to trash the lax team for their “unsavory behavior”.

To my mind this is just CYA. The MSM was wrong and they just cannot admit their mistake. They were all set for an auto-de-fe and they still want to preach their sermons.

It is BS and it is shameful and it is pathetic.

I admit I may be wrong. Perhaps, some of these cranks and haters really are concerned about the exploitation of women. If so, show us the evidence of that concern. Point to the news story or article or op-ed that forthrightly condemned strip clubs and the men who go there. Show us the alarm over the excesses of Spring Break and the bad messages in music videos.

That should be easy enough.

The other lame excuse I’ve read is that the pendulum has swung too far, that the exonerated players are being praised too highly.

That’s possible. But that excuse is only credible if it comes from someone who wrote something favorable about the lax team last spring. Surely anyone who is actually concerned about “balance” had no problem condemning the rush to judgment when the players were being ripped to shreds on TV and in the NY Times. I’m positive they wrote something in defense of the kid who sent the email. Right?

They should also be on record opposing the Dianification of the Rutgers basketball team, too.

Anyone who was silent then, but is now worried about “perspective” has no standing to redress the balance. They are cruel, smug, stupid, and vile.

For my money, the press conference had one purpose: to help the falsely accused repair the damage to their reputations. Too much? Only when those reputations are restored. That will not happen until morons like Moran stop spreading lies.

The Wolfowitz mess

Austin Bray has a perceptive post on the subject.

He makes a very good point about the broader issue of GWB and his administration:

Overweaning arrogance and lack of self reflection are weaknesses of the Wolfowitz-Hadley-Libby-Feith crew. As a group they were well-suited for Beltway political wars — the kind of Beltway congressional and executive agency infighting that Rumsfeld (and Cheney, Libby’s boss) thought they would face in their battle for Pentagon reform and reorganization. 9/11 changed the mission. Instead of a figurative battle in the Beltway’s arena, the civilized world faced a long war with barbarism, a long, bloody war that placed a preimum on strategic clarity, personal courage and perseverance, not the contacts on your Rolodex. After 9/11 the entire lot should have been eased out in favor of experienced, genuine war fighters — real war fighters instead of Beltway Clerks.

See also:

GWB and his MBA

I-gasm: MSM finds bliss in their darkest hour

Is it paranoid to think that the reason the media love the Imus story is that it is so much nicer (to them) than the denouement of the Duke lacrosse case?

Hmmm. Let’s see. One story allows talking heads parade their noble moral sensibility in front of the cameras. The other one highlights their intellectual shortcomings and moral corruption. Which one is filling the airwaves?

I’m disgusted at those people who demanded that Imus apologize and who still want him fired. I’m old school. You don’t demand an apology if you are unwilling to accept it.

I hope Imus gets another radio gig. I really want to hear what he has to say about all the erstwhile friends who threw him under the bus when he was no longer useful to them.

Cowardice and moral preening is such an ugly combination.

Duke lacrosse: Odious

Stuart Taylor:

Nobody but cranks and haters will ever be able to hurl those lies at them again.

Count ABC's Terry Moran as one of the cranks and haters.

Terry Moran's blog post is the most odious thing i've seen today. Sanctimonious, hypocritical and flat wrong.

While he whines that the press does not care about black victims in prison, he does not get to the reason: reporters depend on good relations with the cops and DA. The press does not ignore railroading; it is frequently complicit in it.

We saw it in the lacrosse case. It was true in ritual abuse witch trials. It shows up again and again in the literature of false convictions: lazy reporters let dishonest prosecutors get away with awful things.

And now this reporter wants to bash the lax players for what his professional brethren do?

Moreover, let's remember that the lax team was targeted because they were rich, white, Dukies. That is what gave the story its resonance with journalists. That is why it is was a windfall for Nifong.

Moran's bitterness has nothing to do with the injustice suffered by poor and minority defendants. If he cared about them, he could have used this as one of those "teachable moments" to point to problems and solutions.

No, his vomitous rant is just media CYA. The MSM looks bad. They got conned and they did a terrible job reporting this story. The world knows it. And he is embarrassed. So he takes it out on three young men who do not deserve it.

UPDATE: Ace agrees and he is just on fire.

Imus

I like this analysis. There are parallels with Trent Lott. Where the two affairs diverge is to Imus’s detriment. Lott was only trying to say nice things about an old man who was at death’s door. The slurs on the Rutgers players were mean-spirited and gratuitous.

This is not an isolated incident with Imus and Co. That raises the question of why the media and political elite were so eager to appear on his show for so many years.

Maybe some of them should be asked that question. It might make for interesting reading if their responses today are compared to their statements about Trent Lott.

One thing is for sure, the two controversies show that brazenness pays. Lott and Imus apologized which only increased the demand for more apologies. Al Sharpton never apologizes and now the media treats him as a moral arbiter.

Sharpton’s rise is a sign of our degraded public culture. I do not see the problem as only political; economics also plays a role. Conservative Sean Hannity promotes Sharpton as much as any liberal. Hannity may disagree with Sharpton but he is willing to give him a platform because it makes for “good television.”

Imus used to be edgy. Now he is a bigot. I think that it is easy enough to parse those definitions:

Edgy-- insults people I do not like
Bigot-- insults me or people I do like.

CNN, Fox, and ESPN have devoted truckloads of time to denouncing Imus. It is a two-fer for them. They get to flaunt their moral superiority and tear down a competitive network. Their hypocrisy is just more evidence that brazenness wins.

CNN provides a home for Nancy Grace while Fox is always willing to give Wendy Murphy camera time. In the Duke lacrosse case both women were happy to traffic in rumor, slander, and character assassination. ESPN is the TV home of Selena Roberts , John Saunders, Steven A. Smith, and William Rhoden whose comments on the case were venomous, obtuse, and nearly fact-free.

ESPN also has its own Imus in Tony Kornheiser. One of the running gags on PTI and his radio show is his disdain for the contestants in the National Spelling Bee. He refers to them as “twitching little freaks.” This is mean-spirited and gratuitous and every bit as bad as Imus’s crack about Rutgers. While it lacks the racial element that sends a frisson through the MSM, it has an extra loathsomeness because it is directed at kids who are twelve and thirteen years old.

Imus has been suspended and fired. ESPN is building its brand around Kornheiser. Maybe someone should ask the suits at Bristol about that.

I don’t expect that to happen. The “Imus Scandal” is just an opportunity for a bunch of hacks to preen in front of the cameras. It makes for cheap television and cheaper self-satisfaction.

Tom Wolfe, who really is a prophet for our age:

From the outset the eminence of this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was inseperable from his necessary indignation. It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down on the rest of humanity. And it did not cost him any effort, intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years later: 'Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.

Duke lacrosse: Kurtz does not spare the media

Media Miscarriage

As long as we're talking about how the Rutgers women were unfairly disparaged as "ho's," consider the nightmare that the three Duke lacrosse players have lived through.

But in all the coverage you read and see about the clearing of these young men, very little of it will be devoted to the media's role in ruining their lives. I didn't hear a single television analyst mention it yesterday, even though two of the players' lawyers took shots at the press.

He's right that the media will absolve itself. They've been using the Emily Litella defense for months.

Here's one thing the media should do. Through out this case some reporters were fed information by the DA's office and the police. It is time to reveal those sources and the lies they told.

This is not a case of anonymous whistle-blowers helping to uncover governmental wrong-doing. The secret leaks were part of a frame-up. By protecting them, the reporters are accessories in a miscarriage of justice.

Time to let the sunshine in. Tell us who lied. Show us how deep the corruption spread in Durham.

Kurtz makes another good point:

By the way, Drudge and other Web sites are running the accuser's name and picture. I'm not sure how I feel about this, since she is now a certified liar who put three innocent men and their families through hell, but it still feels cheesy.

I share his misgivings. I've never liked naming the accuser. Then again, i don't like televised perp walks either so i'm entering a plea of "i think i'm consistent." I don't think cable news can do the same. For months they have run the pictures of the lax players getting out of those police cars in handcuffs. They cannot plead that their delicate sensibilities are offended by the picture on Drudge.

One last thing. It is a good time to remember that Al Sharpton and his rent-a-mob had no problem harrassing the victim in the Central Park Jogger case:

Outside the courthouse, they chanted, “The boyfriend did it! The boyfriend did it!” They denounced the victim as “Whore!” They screamed her name, over and over (because most publications refused to print it, though several black-owned ones did). Sharpton brought Tawana Brawley to the trial one day, to show her, he said, the difference between white justice and black justice. He arranged for her to meet the jogger’s attackers, whom she greeted with comradely warmth. In another of his publicity stunts, he appealed for a psychiatrist to examine the victim. “It doesn’t even have to be a black psychiatrist,” he said, generously. He added: “We’re not endorsing the damage to the girl — if there was this damage.”

Duke lacrosse: Vindication

Total and complete vindication. It took a year but the truth has finally caught up with the lies.

KC Johnson's book is going to make very interesting reading now that the charges have been dropped.

AG Cooper has restored a measure of honor to his state.

Sports: Miscellaneous thoughts in search of a theme


Death came for Grambling’s Eddie Robinson right when the coaching carousel was in full swing for college basketball. Very few of those who praised him noted how different he was from the men they cover today.

It is easy to criticize modern players for their bad discipline and self-centeredness. (I know because I’ve done it on this blog.) Let’s recognize that their college coaches help teach those lessons.

The prevailing ethos among big-time college coaches is take the money and run. Most of those coaches still preach the value of discipline, team play, character, and self-sacrifice. As they do so, the larger message they send is “do as I say, not as I do.” All too many coaches who exhort young players to sacrifice for the team are willing to abandon those players and that team for a chance at a bigger payday.

Many of Robinson’s former players spoke about the big role he played in their lives. The sentiments were identical to those I heard after Woody Hayes passed. Both coaches kept a heavy hand on their players and the players came to love them for it.

A coach can only pull that off if their loyalty to the team and to school are absolute. In the case of Hayes and Robinson it was and it worked. When a modern coach applies the same tactics it is just exploitive and tyrannical.

Ricky Williams was roundly (and rightly) criticized for quitting on the Dolphins and letting down his teammates. Nick Saban quit on the Dolphins and did not receive the same level of criticism. It was, apparently, justified by the big pay check. How is it that we have adopted the ethics of whoredom“I did it for the money”?

In his masterful The Face of Battle, John Keegan reflects on the reasons for the British victory at Waterloo. The crux of the battle was simple enough. Napoleon had to break the British line somewhere and was unable to do so. As Keegan puts it:

The British still stood on the line Wellington had marked out for them, planted by the hold officers had over themselves and so over their men. Honour, in a very peculiar sense, had triumphed.

Eddie Robinson’s achievements had the same source as Wellington’s victory. At Grambling, as at Waterloo, honor and selflessness made everything else possible.

What's so bad about good manners?

Tim O'Reilly suggests a blogger code of conduct. Frankly, i think all of his suggestions make sense.

I am unmoved by the argument that bloggers or message boards cannot control their commenters or should not be (morally) responsible for what the commenters say. The blogger provides the habitat and they can (should) control it.

A selection of Chesterton

From Heretics:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing that is really narrow is the clique....The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment like that which exists in hell.
=======
Modern man "says he is fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive. He can visit Venice because to him the Venetians are only Venetians; the people in his own street are men. He can stare at the Chinese because for him the Chinese are a passive thing to be stared at; he he stares at the old lady in the next garden, she becomes active. he is forced to flee, in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals-- of free men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself.
=======
He has to soothe and quiet himself among tigers and vultures, camels and crocodiles. These creatures are indeed very different from himself. But they do not put their shape or colour or custom into a decisive competition with his own. They do not seek to destroy his principles and assert their own; the stranger monsters of the suburban street do seek to do this....The vulture will not roar with laughter because a man does not fly; but the major at No. 9 will roar with laughter because a man does not smoke.
===============
Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common men is a perfectly reasonable thing as long as it does not pretend to any point of of superiority. It is when it calls itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie that its inherenct weakness has in justice to be pointed out. Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description somewhere-- a very powerful description in a purely literary sense-- of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, common voices, and their common minds. As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic. Nietzsche's aristocracy has about it all the sacredness that belongs to the weak. When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.

Crimsonism

Julie Neidlinger has a good analysis of the follies that blue-staters commit when they become sociological tourists out here in the hinterlands.

I've had misgivings about this sort of thing ever since David Brooks wrote his famous piece in The Atlantic. The "reporters" approach us as The Other. They spend only a little time here so their reporting is superficial and they never get beyond the shallow prejudices they brought with them.

In short, they do to their fellow citizens what Edward Said accused Western scholars of doing to Islamic cultures in Orientalism.

The funny thing is, i bet many of the editors who publish this kind of story accept Said's analysis.

In the MSM, this creates all sort of double standards. They will defend the right of Muslim women to wear a veil, but they are suspicious of Christian churches where the women always wear dresses. The Muslim woman chooses her veil, but the Christian woman is forbidden to wear pants.

A mass shooting by a Muslim immigrant is instantly portrayed as the isolated act of a disturbed individual. In no way can Muslim culture be blamed. On the other hand, it is perfectly acceptable to opine about the "gun culture" of a rural area where a white, non-Muslim shoots down innocent people.

Related:

Truly asymmetrical information

Tea parties and the MSM: Bob Dylan nailed it decades ago

I wish i had found this before

Here's an old article from Time that revisits the injustice done to Richard Jewell after the Atlanta Olympic bombing.

This quote does a better job than i did when i tried to bring the Rosenhan experiment into the discussion of criminal investigation:

According to Samuel Gross, a professor of criminal procedure at Michigan Law School, "there's a point at which an open investigation of who committed a crime becomes instead the prosecution of suspect X. If that happens early on in the case, the chances of making a mistake are very great." In the Atlanta bombing, the shift from an open investigation to the prosecution of a particular suspect does seem to have taken place very early, and the result was certainly a mistake.

Here we see the lack of ethics and self-awareness that plague big time reporters. They describe what Jewell went through and then make excuses:

If not despicable then perhaps excessive but also understandable. The Centennial Park bomb came only 10 days after the explosion of TWA Flight 800. Nobody knew whether it marked the beginning of a reign of domestic terror. The FBI was under tremendous pressure to solve the case almost instantaneously so that the Olympic Games' athletes and visitors would not be crippled by fear. But it is common knowledge in law enforcement that "the bigger the case, the lower the standard [of conduct]," says Tierney. "The pressure on the police, on prosecutors is overwhelming."

SO they make excuses for bad police work. The interesting thing (to me) is how they blame the media for it but do not accept or recognize their guilt.

If big stories cause bad police work, and the media makes a story big, then the media fosters bad police work. What are they doing to change this? I think that this question is especially relevant now because the media (especially cable TV) are on a constant search for crime stories that they can turn into programming extravaganzas.

Jack Shafer defends the indefensible

In Defense of the Anna Nicole Feeding Frenzy

i don't deny that there are newsworthy elements to the whole saga. But that is not what cable is doing. They are stretching out the small amount of news to fill hours of primetime. It is cheap filler that completely distorts what is happening in the world. ANS is hardly the most important story in the world, yet that is what cable covers.

See also:

Cable news, vox populi, and professional sleaze

Balkan echoes in Salt Lake City

More Bosnian Lies from Utah

Utah Shootings: Yet Another Case of Sudden Jihad Syndrome, After All

I'm not sure why the authorities treat jihad and mental illness as mutually exclusive. Do they really believe that someone with mental illness would be rejected as a suicide bomber recruit? Seems to me, they would make the BEST recruit: they could be manipulated more easily and they have already crossed a long way to the idea of suicide

Ben Stein is a must read

Terror in Our Midst

On September 11, 2001, about 3,000 fine human beings were killed in New York City, Virginia, and Pennsylvania by Moslem fanatics. So far, there have been no other large-scale attacks by Moslem terrorists on American soil.

However, in the five and a half years since September 11, 2001, there have been roughly 40,000 killings by gangs and gang members in this United States of America, mostly in the African-American and Hispanic sections of large cities. Huge swaths of major American cities, especially my home city of Los Angeles, are "no-go" zones for law-abiding people from outside the neighborhoods and even police go into them reluctantly. The innocent women, children, old folks and non-gansgsta men in the communities are living in a nonstop reign of terror.

I wish someone had the answer to his questions. Maybe if more people dared ask the questions, we could find a solution.

Heather MacDonald: Simply mistaken or just plain evil?

I used to lean toward mistaken. But after reading her latest article i can't rule out evil. It seems to me that she is playing with racism in order to justify police state tactics.

Busy now, but i will write more later.

Popular Mechanics and Rosie O’Donnell

It's sad that they have to rebut irresponsible charges made by an ignorant, unfunny comedienne.

Small movies

Thinking about the previous post. Would Hollywood dare make a movie like that today? Big name stars, no car chases or explosions. Most of the action inside a drab, small room?

OK, i don't see enough movies so i'm sure that there are three hundred indy films a year that are supposed to fill that niche. But how many are left if we exclude gay cowboys eating pudding?