Howard Kurtz is the media’s most diligent watchdog, just ask him. His weekly CNN program, “Reliable Sources” and his regular column at The Daily Beast, are supposed to serve as bellwethers for the most important media stories of any given week. As media watchers and political junkies tuned in this weekend, they probably expected wall-to-wall coverage of the biggest media story of the week, the Kermit Gosnell murder trial in Philadelphia.
Considering his Daily Beast column has been devoid of any mention of the subject and the mounting criticism of the media’s neglect had gained enormous momentum on Friday, as Kurtz was planning his weekend show, it was reasonable to assume it would be topic #1 on “Reliable Sources.”
It turns out, Kurtz could only carve out less than two minutes on the topic, at the very end of his show:
And in the segment, he refused to concede that political bias played a role in their lack of attention to the story. Why did Kurtz only have two minutes to discuss this, the most important story of media neglect in years? Because he had to devote an entire segment, nearly ten minutes, to an interview with a congressman trying to explain why he sent flirty tweets to Cyndi Lauper.
Glad you’re on the job, Howie. You clearly are holding the media’s feet to the fire.