Howie Kurtz: Liberal Media?

Howie Kurtz had the following paragraph in his vignette about Senator Allen:

The press may well have overplayed the macaca gaffe -- there was no comparable frenzy over Webb saying three decades ago that the U.S. Naval Academy was "a horny woman's dream" -- but it was a self-inflicted wound that was captured on video and downloaded thousands of times on YouTube.com.

Clueless Howie scratches his head and plays the unwitting bystander when he notes
"The press may well have overplayed"...."there was no comparable frenzy [concerning Webb]" without connecting the dots. Of course, could it be, could it possibly be that there's something afoot called what on the next page he describes as a:

Liberal Media?
The "mainstream media presents itself as unbiased, when in fact there are built into it many biases, and they are overwhelmingly to the left."

The man who made that comment is not some rabid right-wing critic but Thomas Edsall, a Washington Post political reporter for a quarter-century who recently accepted an early retirement offer.

In an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Edsall said he is pro-choice on abortion and does not think he has ever voted for a Republican presidential candidate. He said he believes that reporters vote Democratic by somewhere between 15 to 1 and 25 to 1.

Edsall, who now writes for the New Republic and has just finished a book called "Building Red America," also said that journalists have an inherent "suspicion" of the military, and he agreed "to a certain degree" with the argument that Fox News and conservative radio became popular because many people, in Hewitt's words, "got sick and tired of being spoon-fed liberal dross" by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.

In an interview, Edsall says the main problem is "an inability to empathize with the way many people in red states think and feel" but that it is "possible" for journalists to set aside their views and report fairly.

Gee whiz, Howie. How perceptive of you not to link the Allen-bashing by the WaPo, your stomping ground, with the non-bashing of Webb for his anti-Semitic, anti-feminist remarks by the same liberally-biased tabloid. And then deftly point out an ex-WaPo editor's observations that he agrees somewhat that the media, specifically the NYT, LAT, and WaPo, spoon feed "liberal dross" which has the perverse effect of making FOX News and conservative talk radio more popular than it otherwise would have been. Are you snarking your senior brass by a triple bank shot?

Or could it be that you are apple-polishing for your betters up there in the high altitudes of WaPo editors' aeries?

Newsbusters has more on strange little Howie's "omissions" and circumspections.