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Howard Kurtz and his panel on Reliable Sources are not impressed with Rush Limbaugh's "in-depth survey of how multimillionaire celebrity patients are treated" in the health care system.

KURTZ: Let me move on to another incident that happened in Hawaii and ended up being covered by the White House correspondents who are with the president, and that was Rush Limbaugh, ,who was hospitalized with chest pains. We were glad that it turned out to be nothing serious.

Limbaugh held a news conference when he was released from that Hawaii hospital, and here's some of what he had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RUSH LIMBAUGH: Based on what happened to me here, I don't think there's one thing wrong with the American health care system. It is working just fine, just dandy, and I got nothing special.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Now, Rush Limbaugh didn't take questions, said he didn't want to talk about politics. But he certainly made a point there about the health care system, didn't he?

SMITH: Of course he did. You've got to love Rush.

He did an in-depth survey of how multimillionaire celebrity patients are treated. And they're treated very well, thank you. And so everything, he said, was fine and dandy.

I mean, it's ridiculous on the face of it. And yet, he made his point. He slipped it in there.

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Lou Dobbs is upset that a Latin television station wants to make people less afraid of census workers by including a plot line in one of their soap operas titled "Don't be afraid to be counted."

DOBBS: Well, fans--if you like that, you're going to love this. Fans of telenovellas on Spanish-language television could soon be seeing more than they tuned in for as well. The Telemundo network, owned by NBC, will incorporate a story line in a popular soap opera to promote the U.S. Census. That's right. They're going to put that into a storyline. It is part of an Obama administration plan to make sure the Latino population is fully counted next year. Ines Ferre with our report.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

INES FERRE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: When it comes to Latin television, no other genre is more popular with more viewers than steamy, plot-driven telenovellas, or soap operas. For the first time, a telenovella will include a plot line surrounding a U.S. Census message. "Don't be afraid to be counted." Telemundo's top soap opera "Mas Sabe el Diablo" or "The Devil Knows Best," will soon feature Michelle Vargas playing the role of a young Census Bureau recruiter.

DON BROWNE, PRESIDENT, TELEMUNDO: This character will live in the novella and basically be entertaining but educational, because education, empowering people with good, accurate information is really critical to the success of the Census.

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Former Fox News contributor Jane Hall says that her ex-colleagues at the conservative network have been "waging a campaign" to link the words "radical" and "Islam" following the bombings at the Boston Marathon earlier this month.

In a Sunday discussion on CNN, host Howard Kurtz noted that after briefly coming together in the aftermath of the tragedy in Boston, the media had returned to its "ideological sniping."

Current TV host Cenk Uygur told Kurtz that Fox News had led the charge in making the airwaves more vitriolic by "talking about Muslims, which is ironic because this is the same Bill O'Reilly who kept calling Dr. Tiller, "Dr. Tiller The Baby Killer," until Scott Roeder shot him."

"So here's a fundamentalist who's Christian worrying about fundamentalists who are Muslims, and driving people to violence," Uygur said.

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CNN media critic Howard Kurtz on Sunday pushed back against a Fox News pundit who slammed the "deafening silence of too much of the media" over coverage of a Philadelphia doctor accused of killing seven babies and one woman while performing late-term abortions.

In a USA Today column last week, Fox News political analyst Kirsten Powers pointed to former Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell as evidence that Planned Parenthood has been wrong to claim that it's "highly unusual" that infants survive late-term abortions.

Powers said that there was a double standard because conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh had received front page coverage after he called Sandra Fluke a "slut" over her advocacy of contraception coverage for students, but Gosnell had not gotten the same attention.

"You don't have to oppose abortion rights to find late-term abortion abhorrent or to find the Gosnell trial eminently newsworthy," the Fox News pundit wrote. "The deafening silence of too much of the media, once a force for justice in America, is a disgrace."

In his "Media Monitor" segment on Sunday, Kurtz agreed that the Gosnell case had not gotten enough national coverage, but suggested that conservatives had oversimplified the argument to attack the "liberal media."

"Some conservatives are saying this amounts to blackout by the so-called liberal media, but it's more complicated that that," he explained. "First, the Gosnell case has drawn some coverage since the FBI first raided that clinic back in 2010, in such outlets as Time, NPR, the AP, The New York Times, Slate and The Daily Beast. Now since Gosnell's trial began, CNN has done a half dozen segments, including one by Jake Tapper back on March 21 and Fox News did a story that same day."

"MSNBC, like Fox, has done a few stories," Kurtz continued. "CBS and ABC carried evening news segments back in January, but there hasn't been nearly enough on the trial. Almost nothing in The Washington Post, not enough in The New York Times. Perhaps the mainstream press is less attuned to a story that cast a shadow on abortion, but the conservative media didn't do much either."

"And it's not like even the staunchest pro-choice advocate would defend what Gosnell is alleged to have done. This is a gruesome case that journalists on both sides of the abortion question have told me is hard to stomach."

The Philly Post's Simon van Zuylen-Wood wrote last week that the media should cover the Gosnell case, but it was wrong to use it as a tool to fight against abortion rights.

"Powers is a liberal and an evangelical Christian; she criticizes the right on women’s rights, the left on abortion," he observed. "Powers’s aim is to draw attention to the fact that the Gosnell murder charges should make us consider whether there’s really a difference between killing a baby inside the womb, or outside, as he so horrifically did. But this is misleading."

"The moral to be drawn from the Gosnell trial is not that current abortion laws are screwed up. Indeed, Gosnell broke them, which is why he’s on trial. Rather, it’s that as individual states increasingly restrict abortion rights, more and more illegal clinics, like Gosnell’s may crop up."

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On this Sunday's Reliable Sources on CNN, ESPN senior writer Andy Katz was asked by host Howard Kurtz about Fox hosts Eric Bolling and Sean Hannity and their defense of the abusive Rutgers basketball coach last week and Katz was more than happy to give Kurtz an earful with what he thought of them.

KATZ: It's ridiculous. Okay, first of all, they were losing. So that tactic wasn't working, You can clearly motivate without physical contact, without slurs. I mean, it's been proven time and time again at all levels of sports. You do not have to go to that level.

You can position. You can adjust, you know, physically moving people in different sports, but you cannot, absolutely and we saw that with the assistant Jimmy Martelli. You cannot physically hit someone. You can't throw things at someone and you cannot... We're in a different era. You can't have those kind of homophobic slurs. You can't.

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CNN media critic Howard Kurtz on Sunday said that Fox News host Sean Hannity had "surrendered the high ground" when he followed up an explosive interview with Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) by comparing the African-American congressman to a white supremacist hate group.

In an interview last week, Ellison had appeared on Hannity's show and blasted the Fox News host for being "the worst excuse for a journalist I’ve ever seen.”

Hannity responded two days later by linking Ellison to the controversial Nation of Islam and black militant Khalid Muhammad, whom he said wanted to “kill the women, everything white that’s in sight — kill the women, kill the babies, kill the children, kill the old people.”

The conservative host continued by saying that the Democratic lawmaker was the "equivalent" of the Ku Klux Klan.

“Do we have somebody then in Congress that is the equivalent on one side what the Klan is?” Hannity asked. “Because I view the rabid rantings of Khalid Muhammad as frightening.”

On Sunday, Kurtz noted that Ellison had made a mistake because "Hannity's not a journalist, he's a conservative commentator."

"What was troubling here was Ellison accepted the invitation to come on and then seemed only interested in attacking Hannity," the CNN host argued. "But I do have to deduct points over what Hannity did later in the week: He attacked Ellison, who is Muslim, for having written two papers supporting [Nation of Islam leader] Louis Farrakhan as a law student and suggesting that Ellison might be the -- quote -- 'equivalent' of the Ku Klux Klan."

"Even Hannity had to allude the fact that the congressman apologized a half dozen years ago for once having supported Farrakhan," Kurtz pointed out.

"And with that, Hannity surrendered the high ground."

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This "access" whinefest by the media, which has been going on for the better part of the week, isn't legitimate and isn't about their ability to practice journalism.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. Howard Kurtz and his panel this Sunday, which included David Zurawik, Julie Mason and Bill Plante come across as still being pissed off that none of them had a chance to snap a picture of President Obama playing golf with Tiger Woods.

As Kevin Drum said, it would be easier to sympathize with these national reporters if they really did ask tough, unpredictable questions of the President, but they don't. And Drum's observations on the Politico article and their complaints about the White House using social media and going around the press, can be applied to the conversation here as well:

At the same time, the reporters interviewed for this piece seem to be weirdly upset over the fact that the Obama White House uses Twitter and Facebook and releases lots of its own photos. Why is this a problem? It's 2013, guys. Why shouldn't a president communicate with the public using whatever mediums the public happens to consume? Over the past century, that's evolved from whistle-stop tours to radio to TV to Facebook, but so what? Why should reporters be unhappy about this?

Given the sorry state of our corporate media these days, I don't think they're going to get much sympathy from most of the public.

Transcript below the fold.

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I hate to break it to Mr. Axis-of-Evil David Frum -- who was more than happy to be one of those conservative flame throwers when he was still in the club -- but Fox finally getting rid of Palin doesn't represent any kind of sea change for the network. They've still got a long, long list of others who are just as bad as Palin and Beck still working at that network and so unless we see some mass firings there, it's business as usual with or without Palin.

And CNN TeaNN doesn't have much room to talk about giving extremists air time after watching them work every bit as hard as Fox to promote the AstroTurf "tea party" and giving these flame throwing politicians endless interviews with little to no push back. I don't expect we'll see Howard Kurtz talking about that on his Sunday show any time soon though.

KURTZ: For three years now the former governor of Alaska has been one of the most prominent voices on Fox News.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SARAH PALIN, FORMER GOVERNOR OF ALASKA: Barack Obama is a socialist. He believes in socialism, in redistributing wealth and confiscating hard-earned dollars of our small business men and women.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: On Friday we learned that Sarah Palin's contract will not be renewed. Sarah Palin was a very hot property when Fox hired in her 2009. What happened?

PAGE: That's showbiz. You know, she has really kind of played out now I guess as far as is Fox is concerned and her appeal. But it's been said Roger Ailes was not happy with the Palin arrangement. He wants to get away from that sort of showbiz punditry on the right, unless she's going to it clear her candidacy, I suppose.

KURTZ: Is it the political climate has changed since Palin's VP run, rise in the Tea Party or is it Sarah Palin's star has simply faded?

FRUM: I think both are true. Watch this in tandem when Glenn Beck was taken off the air. There was this period from 2009 to 2011 where there was nothing to wild too put on Fox News. Beck began to frighten his programmers. This man was capable of saying anything, including things that could wreck his show, damage the network.

And as they backed away from him, as they have backed away from other characters who went, the whole exercise is, the whole network is an exercise in going too far, but as they retreated from those who went farthest, I think this is a milestone, as well.

KURTZ: My reporting shows that Fox News did offer Sarah Palin a new contract, but what I would call low ball offer, significantly less, a fraction of the million dollars a year she had been paid.

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On CNN's Reliable Sources this Sunday, Howard Kurtz did a segment focusing on whether the pundits out there in the media who were telling everyone it would be a Romney blowout, should pay a price for being continually wrong with their predictions. I think Kurtz misses the forest for the trees with his criticism, primarily because any real analysis about just how bad most of the corporate media's election coverage was, would require him taking a look at his own network and not just Fox News.

First and foremost, if we're ever going to do anything about getting the money out of politics, we're not going to get much help, if any, out of the industries primarily profiting from it, which is all of the television stations and radio stations across the country. You're not going to see the pundits out there saying much about all of those advertising dollars when their companies and everyone they work with is thriving because of it.

And then there's the issue of Rove and his ilk on Fox, who was not just that he was misleading viewers with overly optimistic predictions about the election results, but also running a PAC. Fox continually failed to disclose Rove's involvement in the election. They also made a regular habit of bringing on Romney campaign advisers as pundits and failing to disclose their roles as well..

If Kurtz wants to give an honest assessment of the coverage of this presidential election, there's a lot more wrong with it than just pundits getting predictions wrong. And what I noted here is just the tip of the iceberg. Endless focus on polls and the horse race, rather than substance, the issue of media consolidation, fake balance where there is none and a host of other issues are a lot bigger problem than talking heads being rewarded for failure.

Full transcript of Kurtz and his panel's remarks below the fold.

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CNN host Howard Kurtz on Sunday blasted News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch for an "atrocious" suggestion that stereotyped the "Jewish owned press" as having a hidden agenda.

In a tweet on Saturday, Murdoch had lashed out at what he called the "Jewish owned press" for its coverage of a recent conflict between Hamas and Israel.

"Why is Jewish owned press so consistently anti-Israel in every crisis?" he wrote.

The Daily Beast's Peter Beinart quickly noted that Murdoch's tweet managed to offend both journalists and Jews.

"It’s offensive to journalists because it implies that institutions of the 'press' should reflect the ideological biases of their owners," Beinart wrote. "Reading Murdoch’s tweet, it would be logical to conclude that he believes that any newspaper he owns should reflect his right-wing views, even in its news coverage."

"Murdoch’s tweet is offensive to Jews because he’s suggesting that when it comes to Israel, Jewish media-owners should let their Jewishness guide their journalism. ... Murdoch seems upset that Jewish media owners are not Israel-firsters. He wants their tribal loyalty to a Jewish state to trump their professional obligation to oversee fair-minded, unbiased journalism."

In his Sunday media analysis on CNN, Kurtz also tore into Murdoch.

"Last night, he went beyond outrageous to offensive," the media critic said of Murdoch, observing that most media organizations -- with the exception The New York Times -- were owned by public companies like Viacom, Comcast, Disney and Time Warner.

"And beyond that, this media mogul who isn't shy about interfering in his own newsrooms is suggesting that Jewish Americans have a hidden agenda in which their religion trumps their commitment to journalism," he added. "That is atrocious and it is beneath Rupert Murdoch."