Howard Kurtz is an idiot

Of course, you knew that. However, in this chock full of fail CNN piece, Kurtz confesses his abject ignorance:

I never realized that the conservative media were so eye-poppingly powerful.

This great revelation comes at the top of Kurtz mewling about POTUS, Gore and all us loser libs "whining" about how the wingnut media machine is destroying civil society. Kurtz just can't understand what the problem is here. Oh sure, Fox and Limbaugh and their lesser minions have a media operation that blasts out unfiltered bullshit and shameless lies 24/7 but gosh, President Obama has the bully pulpit.

Apparently it has escaped his notice that President Obama can speak for an hour but the entirety of BigMedia will focus on a single sentence, out of context, in their daily attempts to build traffic inducing faux scandals. Case in point being Obama's recent interview which launched a great investigation into the very serious question of exactly how often our President shoots skeet. We're now in something like day six of the relentless mass probing into this matter, surely the top concern of every American living outside the Beltway bubble.

In fact, Obama had much more to say in that interview, but most people won't know that because our very important BigMedia gatekeepers don't mention the substantive points. The focus has largely been entirely on one off-hand question at the end.

And as for Obama's alleged "whining," let's review a few excerpts of what he actually said, again in response to a direct question, about why it's so hard to get anything done in DC with a Republican minority whose sole focus is on permanent obstruction:

The truth is that most of the big issues that are going to make a difference in the life of this country for the next thirty or forty years are complicated and require tough decisions, but are not rocket science. [...]

So the question is not, Do we have policies that might work? It is, Can we mobilize the political will to act? [...]

I think what we really have to do is change some of the incentive structures so that people feel liberated to pursue some common ground.[...]

One of the biggest factors is going to be how the media shapes debates. If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you'll see more of them doing it.[...]

Nobody gets on TV saying, "I agree with my colleague from the other party." People get on TV for calling each other names and saying the most outlandish things.

Sounds to me like an astute assessment of what's broken in BigMedia. The only whining I hear is from Kurtz, but I guess you can't blame him. As the saying goes, the truth hurts...