Easier To Take From Hitch?

Everything that Christopher Hitchens says about the New York Times' coverage could be said about the Post. The excerpt below starts with a graf from the NYT:

The protests were largely sponsored by two groups, the Answer Coalition, which embodies a wide range of progressive political objectives, and United for Peace and Justice, which has a more narrow, antiwar focus.

The name of the reporter on this story was Michael Janofsky. I suppose that it is possible that he has never before come across "International ANSWER," the group run by the "Worker's World" party and fronted by Ramsey Clark, which openly supports Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and the "resistance" in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Clark himself finding extra time to volunteer as attorney for the génocidaires in Rwanda. Quite a "wide range of progressive political objectives" indeed, if that's the sort of thing you like. However, a dip into any database could have furnished Janofsky with well-researched and well-written articles by David Corn and Marc Cooper—to mention only two radical left journalists—who have exposed "International ANSWER" as a front for (depending on the day of the week) fascism, Stalinism, and jihadism.

Not only could this be said about the Post, it has been said, here at PostWatch  and to greater effect elsewhere. So, again I say, it is strange to see Howard Kurtz ignore the elephant in the room in his Media Notes Extra column online. Matt Rustler of Stop the Bleating is exactly correct to suggest it's a small sign of progress--with the emphasis on small--that his own blog's questioning about "novice protester" Patrice Cuddy gets an extremely brief mention in Kurtz's column today. How brief? This brief:

Speaking of the demos, Stop the Bleating says a middle-aged woman quoted by the WashPost as a novice protestor is actually a longtime antiwar organizer.

I hope Kurtz reads Hitchens today, though I wonder if it will make much difference. Kurtz is hardly unfriendly to bloggers, quoting and linking them early and often in many of his online columns. So he must be aware of the ridicule being heaped upon the Post for its failure on the ANSWER/WWP front. The question is whether he, or anyone else at the Post, will ever acknowledge it. Earlier this year I would have assumed he'd address it eventually, but then I thought the same thing about the Air America funding scandal.

As it relates to the protest, Kurtz comments mainly about disputes over how large the crowd was, and bats down a bizarre suggestion by a live chat participant yesterday that television news is trying to prolong the war to boost ratings. For what it's worth, a friend of mine who attended the rally thinks 100,000 people is a reasonable estimate, based on his diligent and admirable experience in attending Penn State football games (that's my alma mater too; Beaver Stadium holds around 104,000).

And skeptics told me attending a football college would never pay off in life!