According to Howard Kurtz, the media held Bush to "tough standards"

[ProSense]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/11/13/BL2006111300266.html">The Democrats' Turn

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 13, 2006; 8:04 AM

The media kept saying the war was going badly. The Bush administration said progress in Iraq was being obscured by relentlessly negative coverage.

The media kept saying the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina was badly botched. President Bush initially said his administration was doing a heckuva job.

The media kept saying the Democrats were heading for a big win on Election Day. Karl Rove, when told by National Public Radio's Robert Siegel that he was reading the same campaign polls as the White House strategist, declared: "No, you're not. You're not. I'm looking at 68 polls a week . . . and I add up to a Republican Senate and Republican House."

The GOP lost control of Capitol Hill last week for a number of reasons, particularly the war (the televised pictures of growing casualties were hard to shake off) and the scandals involving Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham and Mark Foley (all of which were broken by news organizations). At times it seemed like the administration and the Fourth Estate were offering two different versions of reality. But in the end the polls accurately forecast the thumping to come.

Now the question is whether a press corps that has been openly at odds with the president will hold the newly empowered Democrats to the same tough standards.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/11/13/BL2006111300266.html">more...

[zbdent]

1. Oh, God, please!!!!

the "media held Bush to a tough standard"????

Yeah, the last few weeks of the election ... but have held Dems accountable for every misstep, every flub (gee, nobody ever heard that "muffed joke" by Kerry ... nobody ...), kissed the asses of all the Repukes who were saying that the Dems were unpatriotic ...

:eyes:

[Joe Bacon]

2. Hmmm, I don't think Whoreward's wife did that with Arnold!

Is there no lie the PRE$$TITUTE$ won't tell for their Republican masters?

[ixion]

3. and somehow Kurtz is still taken seriously

even though it's obvious that he's a RW shill, and nothing more.

[still_one]

4. what do you expect him to say? What is funny is he is suppossed to be critical of the MSM?

what a joke

Iraq should have been in the headlines EVERYDAY, it wasn't even close

I blame the media with propagating the lies of this administration, and NOT providing the critical investigative reporting that they should have done

The media is run by the corporations, who now run our government

[nuxvomica]

5. Somebody needs to go deep up river

And bring Kurtz back to reality.

[reichstag911]

6. "Mistah Kurtz...

...he dead." Or may as well be given how insightful his commentary is.

[Demit]

7. Well, to his (feeble) credit, Kurtz does say this:

"...When Democratic chairmen issue subpoenas and conduct oversight hearings, will news accounts portray them as harassing the White House? Or will journalists recognize that aggressive congressional inquiries were a normal practice until the GOP Congress, which loved to investigate the Clinton White House, essentially stopped scrutinizing the Bush administration? And if Senate Republicans who denounced Democratic filibusters start trying to talk things to death, will journalists call them on the double standard? ..."

So, a tiny hiphiphooray for Howie Kurtz, for acknowledging some reality.

[ProSense]

11. Yup!

Bookmark that statement!

[wisteria]

8. Sure they did. LOL. n/t

[HaggardsMethDealer]

9. Yeah, they reall held his feet to the fire for the last six years...

Guess that's why they let him get elected in 00 and 04.....the liberal media is just silly like that :eyes:

[blondeatlast]

10. Howard Kurtz=Tool. What's sad is that he seems to be the only one who can't

see it.

[Elidor]

12. This is an important plot point in his fictitious narrative of a fair media

It signals to the rest of the Kool Kids that it's now time to pound the Democrats very hard.

[Arkansas Granny]

13. This sounds like Brit Hume yesterday on Fox News Sunday when

he stated something to the effect that is was common knowledge that the media is easier on liberals that they are on conservatives. Can they possibly believe this? My belief is that if the media was truly liberal, we would never have had Bush for President.

[spooky3]

14. "Reality has a well-known liberal bias." - Stephen Colbert

at the Correspondents' dinner last April.

[gratuitous]

15. What color is the sky in Howard's world?

Because it sure doesn't bear any resemblence to the one I live in. The media were tough on Bush and the Republicans? Kurtz assembles a tiny compendium of their worst sins, but only those that have been too big to ignore (Katrina) or that have resulted in actual court convictions (Cunningham, DeLay, Abramoff). Totally off the radar, as far as Kurtz is concerned, is any mention of the long list of failures, fuck-ups and malfeasance that have so far remained out of the public discourse because the media couldn't be bothered with it. Just a few f'rinstances: How many times have the names Richard Pombo or Jerry Lewis come up on the national news? What sort of discussion has there been about Pat Roberts sitting on the second phase (the accountability portion) of the Iraq investigation? What's going on in our names and with our tax dollars at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and who knows how many more unnamed locations around the globe?

Up yours, Howard.

[kentuck]

16. Howard Kurtz is full of shit...

to put it bluntly. The media is partly responsible for us being where we are today in Iraq and other messes. They did not do their job.