Hey, It Is Easier To Take Criticism From Hitch

Bloggers including myself have been wailing away for days about  the failure of mainstream media to tell the truth about antiwar protest organizer ANSWER, and after media reporter Howard Kurtz failed to address the issue in a recent live chat, I wondered--half in jest--whether the message would get through after Christopher Hitchens (again) tackled the issue. It did get through. Kurtz in his online column today:

--The media have done a poor job of describing who was behind Saturday's big antiwar demo in D.C. This is in no way to cast aspersions on the tens of thousands of ordinary folks who showed up to demonstrate their opposition to U.S. policy in Iraq. But many journalists shortchanged their readers and viewers in not saying more about the radical group ANSWER.

The Washington Post offered this brief description of ANSWER and United for Peace and Justice: "Both groups have sponsored other major demonstrations against the war in Iraq but also protested U.S. foreign policy in places ranging from Haiti to the Gaza Strip."

I wonder if the media would have resorted to such shorthand in covering a group as far to the right as ANSWER is to the left. In Slate, Christopher Hitchens blames journalistic laziness...

After which Kurtz quotes from Hitch's column. Kurtz goes on to cite Andrew Sullivan and the Columbia Journalism Review.

In the quote supplied by Kurtz, Hitchens faults the reporting of the New York Times' Michael Janofsky. Perhaps it is human nature for Kurtz to refrain from naming Petula Dvorak as the chief culprit at his own paper (that is to say, she wrote most of the stories about the protest that whitewashed ANSWER, as she did in the story that Kurtz quotes from but doesn't link to. Here it is. And here's what I said about it). 

Perhaps it is also human nature for Kurtz not to name PostWatch, though I'm sure I've blogged about the Post's failure on this issue more than anyone else and, unless there is an automated message delete installed somewhere, I'm certain he knows about this blog. Never mind the good fortune of receiving attention & links about ANSWER from prominent sources including Instapundit; I've also sent unanswered emails to Kurtz on other issues, and have had the pleasure of being ignored during live chats. That's a common pleasure, by the way, most of which is explained by the volume of messages he must be pummeled with.

But eventually one would expect a media critic for the Washington Post to notice a blogger running an operation called "PostWatch" after a half-year of posting eight times a day under his own name (that's "Christopher Fotos," Howard, and the last name starts with an "F." Not "Ph." Email me any time).

Well, it's not about me not very much so kudos to Kurtz for acknowledging the problem, even if he soft-pedaled what happened in his own newsroom.

Update: At the moment, the link Kurtz provides to the CJR blog is to the homepage, so for future reference here's a direct link to its post on ANSWER.