Michelle Malkin points out something that we missed: at the very end of his column in the Washington Post today, Howard Kurtz notes the controversy over the apparently fake “GOP talking points memo” that Democratic aides circulated last week. Kurtz’s commentary, however, is extraordinarily lame:
Powerline, which played a role in exposing CBS’s National Guard memos, is wondering about the Republican strategy memo that, oddly enough, fails to list an author:
Kurtz assumes the point in issue, that the unidentified sheet of paper is, in fact, a “Republican strategy memo.” And not only does the document not “list an author,” there is nothing about it to indicate its origins. Kurtz continues by quoting this post, which was the latest in a series of posts on the dubious memo and simply reinforced the point that ABC had backed off its original characterization of the memo as having been generated by Republicans. In that post, I quoted from an email that an ABC employee sent to blogger Josh Clayborn. Kurtz concludes:
Maybe the Powerline gang is right. But knocking down an unsigned memo by reporting an unsigned e-mail?
This is simply inexplicable. Here is how I described the email: “An ABC source writes:” Where did I say that the email was “unsigned”? In fact, the email was signed, but I didn’t use the ABC employee’s name because I didn’t have permission to do so.
The more fundamental point, of course, is that Kurtz purports to take up the issue of the apparently-fraudulent memo, but never addresses the many substantive arguments we have raised on the subject, beginning with the fact that the only people who have been reported as passing out the memo (by the New York Times) were Democratic aides. Not one of Kurtz’s finer moments. But now that we know that he is aware of the controversy, can we expect him to actually cover it?
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