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From Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz hosts a panel discussion on Lou Dobbs departure from CNN. I guess Howard thinks bringing in bullying, right wing, Rush Limbaugh wanna-be hack Chris Plante to concern troll for Dobbs somehow made this panel "balanced". All it did was make it ridiculous.

Plante uses an extremely broad brush to throw around accusations of "liberal" media bias. Anyone think Campbell Brown who's married to Dan Senor is a "liberal". Or that Larry King is an "opinion show"? Or that Chip Reid is any less of a Villager hack than the rest of them out there just because he worked for Joe Biden? Or George Stephanopoulos because he worked for Clinton but subjects us to endless interviews with McCain since he lost the election and George Will's sour mug every week? Liberal my ass. Plante also defends Dobbs for both his anti-immigrant rants and birther rhetoric.

Transcript via CNN.

KURTZ: Chris Plante, many liberals cheering Dobbs' sudden exit. A "New York Times" editorial called him close to a right wing ranter who distorts the facts. Is the media being fair to Lou Dobbs?

PLANTE: Well, of course not. Well the reason Lou Dobbs was in trouble is not because he has opinions, it's because of what his opinions were and his opinions are out of lockstep with the rest of the mainstream news media. "The New York Times" in their -- pretty much every report also say that he's a crusader against immigrants, or immigration and that's false. It's a misrepresentation and it speaks to their point of view. And maybe "The New York Times" should be taking a look at itself rather than Lou Dobbs.

KURTZ: Eric Deggans, Dobbs for years was a conventional business anchor, but do you believe in recent years that he became more of a crusader than a journalist?

DEGGANS: I think it's obvious and I could not disagree more with your previous panelist's assertions. It became obvious that Lou was pressing this world view about illegal immigration being at the root of a ton of evils in America, and I think a lot of his conclusions were debatable.

"60 Minutes" exposed that he had said things about illegal immigrants causing a rise in leprosy in the United States that just could not be backed up. And he's also made assertions of the criminality of illegal immigrants that statistics just don't bear out. So opinions are one thing, but to be unfair and to make assertions that are not true or to exaggerate using selective data, that is just not something that's very ethical and very fair or anything that helps anyone.

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[H/t Dave]

Well, at least Howard Kurtz -- unlike Bill O'Reilly -- didn't completely sucker for Lou Dobbs' wildly overblown tale of someone taking a shot at his home.

In fact, on yesterday's "Reliable Sources" show on CNN, Kurtz hosted a pretty frank discussion of the likelihood that Dobbs was trying to martyr himself and attack his critics by claiming they were shooting at him -- when there's extremely high likelihood that this was a stray bullet from a rifle shot by a hunter in the nearby woods.

Most of the frank talk can be credited to Margaret Carlson, who was in Feisty mode. Unfortunately, she was counterbalanced by Lyin' John Fund, who managed to completely obfuscate why Dobbs is in trouble for the way he discussed immigration:

KURTZ: Margaret, if some nut was actually taking a shot at Lou Dobbs and his wife, is it fair for him to then blame it on the media climate surrounding his fervent opposition to illegal immigration?

CARLSON: No, but he loves doing it. Speak of your own publicity machine, Lou Dobbs generates so much about his own self. And he takes extreme views in part for ratings.

KURTZ: But that suggests he doesn't believe what he's saying.

CARLSON: You know, I think like Glenn Beck and some of these others, you come to believe when you're saying because it is so satisfying to you in terms of ratings and income. Listen, the police who investigated this said that it's hunting season, and there was a bullet mark in the attic on the third floor of his house. That he and his wife were in the same place at the same time, there's no evidence of that.

I mean, it sounds to me from the evidence that he was blowing this up into -- to be a victim -- to be a victim of the media when there's absolutely no, just no evidence that somebody was shooting at him or his wife.

KURTZ: John Fund, we don't know exactly what happened, but it is true that New Jersey state police did kind of play down this incident.

Did Dobbs go too far in trying to tie this to his stance on immigration?

FUND: I think, look, my brother was in law enforcement, and it's always a close call, because if you talk about people threatening you or possibly taking a shot at you, that can encourage other people to go after you. So I probably would have stayed away from it simply for reasons of security. But this issue of what his views are...

KURTZ: Just briefly.

FUND: ... "The Wall Street Journal" is very pro-legal immigration. But Lou Dobbs' views are not that extreme. He basically says we should enforce the laws we have on the books involving illegal immigration. Characterizing it as extreme, I think mischaracterizes his position.

KURTZ: That is a debate for another day. We'll have you back.

Actually, Dobbs' "position" on immigration sounds reasonable when he starts talking about how he thinks we ought to increase immigration levels. But that was after he started getting called out for his incessant extremism. Before that, it's true he didn't explicitly call for mass deportations -- rather, he frequently argued for an aggressive policy of rounding up illegal immigrants and making their lives so miserable they left on their own. Basically an attrition-by-oppression plan. (And he has in fact expressed his avid support for deportation.)

But the reason Dobbs is viewed as an extremist on immigration has much less to do with his stated "position" on immigration, and everythign to do with his "reportage" on immigration and its outrageous and racially incendiary content -- the effects of which are felt in such real-world phenomena as an outbreak of anti-Latino hate crimes:

As for the claim that the Latino-bashing is something else -- the neutral and completely benign criticism of illegal immigration generally -- we've known this is nonsense for some time, especially Lou Dobbs' case. If Dobbs and cohorts like FAIR (an SPLC-designated hate group) really were only concerned about only illegal immigration, then Dobbs needs to explain:

* Why he makes up phony statistics connecting immigration generically with a supposed increase in diseases like leprosy.

* Why he broadcasts white-supremacist mythology about a Hispanic “Aztlan” conspiracy to return the Southwest to Mexico.

* Why he continually claims that Latino immigration is responsible for an increase in crime.

* Why he once said that this wave of immigration is turning America into “a third world cesspool” (a remark that has since been removed from the CNN website).

* Why he constantly promotes the notion of making English the official U.S. language.

* Why he regularly refers to this wave of immigration as an “invasion.”

* Why he regularly hosts anti-immigrant voices from white-supremacist groups and vigilante scam artists like the Minutemen and yet neglects to explain his guests' troubling backgrounds.

That, and much more, constitute the reasons Dobbs is viewed as an extremist on immigration.

John Fund can sugarcoat it and hope everyone forgets about Dobbs' real record of race-baiting on immigration. It's a common right-wing tactic to whine that all they want to talk about is immigration and yet doing so brings reflexive accusations of racism, and that's so unfair. But the fact is, we'd all love to talk about immigration with dealing with racism -- but right-wingers like Lou Dobbs do their best to make sure we have to.

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Does anyone think that Howard Kurtz isn't fully aware of the documentation that Media Matters has done of the daily bigotry and racism that comes out of Limbaugh's mouth? Kurtz plays devil's advocate to ESPN's Mike Wilbon as to whether it was fair or not for the NFL to decide they didn't want Limbaugh owning a team and for black people to feel that he is racist.

Kurtz points to a single quote which Limbaugh claims he never said, and uses that as a reason to either ignore or pretend he doesn't know about all of the other racist things Rush has said on his radio show.

While I would not expect Mike Wilbon to be aware of the work Media Matters has done with documenting Rush Limbaugh's quotes, I don't know how Howard Kurtz can call himself a "media critic" and not be. Maybe he chooses to ignore them since he's been in their line of fire as well. Who knows.

I don't want Rush Limbaugh or anyone else having things they didn't say attributed to them. But Kurtz buying into Limbaugh's claim that he's some kind of victim and not actually a racist because one lousy quote out of hundreds might have been wrong looks like lazy journalism to me. One click here- Limbaugh Wire- and taking the time to read some of the work that's gone into that site and Kurtz wouldn't have to be asking his black guests what black people might have heard from Limbaugh on the radio that offended them. He'd already know.

KURTZ: Mike Wilbon, welcome.

WILBON: Thank you, Howie.

KURTZ: Let me play for you something you said on "Pardon the Interruption" soon after the news broke that Rush Limbaugh was part of a team trying to buy the St. Louis Rams.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

WILBON: I don't know whether Rush Limbaugh is a straight up bigot or he simply plays one on TV and radio, but he is universally reviled by black people in this country.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

KURTZ: So, maybe a straight up bigot, universally reviled by black people. In retrospect, do you think you went a little too far?

WILBON: Universally reviled by African-Americans. That's no surprise. Anybody who wants to walk down any boulevard in predominantly African-American communities will find that out very, very quickly, Howie. No, that assessment is a very easy one to make.

KURTZ: But when you say he may be a straight up bigot, you're saying he doesn't like black folks.

WILBON: He may be. I mean, if you listen to what he says on his show -- and I stopped a long time ago, and I can't tell you specifics of what he said. Meeting him in person is one thing. I have. Communicating with him one-on-one is one thing.

His radio persona, which is all that most people have of Rush Limbaugh, particularly black people in this country, that's a different perception. And I would not back away from that comment at all.

KURTZ: All right. Let's talk a little bit about this alleged "slavery" comment.

Now, this was purported to have been said some years ago by Limbaugh: "Slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back, I'm just saying it had its merits."

Let me briefly run through the chronology here. This was published in a book about three years ago. It made it on to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and then it was picked up once the Rams story broke by Bryan Burrwell and "The St. Louis Post-Dispatch," Drew Sharp in "USA Today," CNN's Rick Sanchez, and then you mentioned it on your ESPN program.

What happened then?

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CNN's media critic, Howard Kurtz, came up with THE answer to all our complaints:

KURTZ: And if liberals or conservatives like David Brooks don't like what the high-decibel pundits say or think they're peddling misinformation, they should go after them in the media marketplace, not with boycotts or name-calling or screaming or shouting, but on the battlefield of ideas.

Wow, that's so simple. Why didn't anybody think of that? Wait a second. Just hold on there. Isn't organizing a boycott an actual idea which then takes a ton of work to be successful? Isn't leading a boycott against a Glenn Beck or a Lou Dobbs actually going into the media marketplace and hitting them right in the pocketbook?

Can Howard suggest what battlefield of ideas I should go on? Does he consider Reliable Sources one of those battlefields? Can Howard help fund a radio program for me that will air either before or right after Sean Hannity, on all the same nationwide affiliates so I can at least partially compete with Hannidate's audience and have a chance to express my ideas at his level?

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CNN's "media critic" Howard Kurtz brought on Air America's Ana Maria Cox and the Washington Examiner's Chris Stirewalt to discuss the statement by the White House Communications director Anita Dunn that "Fox News often operates as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party".

The topic turns to ACORN and Cox points out that the story Fox was pushing on ACORN was really not a story and notes that the problem was not voter fraud but in problems with some voter registrations and before Kurtz can change the subject says this about Fox’s attacks on Kevin Jennings.

Cox: And I’m sorry, I have to say something about this Jennings story because I think it’s really offensive. They’re persecuting someone because he’s gay.

Kurtz: We don’t have time to go through each controversy right now, but did Fox have the same appetite for stories that reflected poorly on the Bush administration?

Somehow Kurtz then found the time to talk about the reaction to President Obama being given the Nobel and later the David Letterman sex scandal.

Media Matters has much more on Fox’s attacks on Kevin Jennings.

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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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(h/t Heather)

Why is it so hard for the media to discuss the obvious racial overtones of so much of President Obama's opposition? The right-wing fanatics are not even trying to cover it up and still the media try to avoid the obvious by framing it as a pundit problem.

Howard Kurtz wonders why the media is having problems these days with Americans in terms of perceptions about their accuracy. (Pew: Press Accuracy Rating Hits Two Decade Low)

I understand that calling someone a racist is no small thing, but facts are facts, and I can't deny what I see with my own two eyes. Can you? Can the media? (John Aravosis had a great post last week with plenty of visual examples.)

Instead of Howard Kurtz really taking a look at the racist underbelly that has risen to new heights at the town halls, he frames it like this:

Kurtz: So are the pundits and the press inflaming this debate about race?

To the media, the debate isn't about the racism that is actually happening on the ground and in front of our eyes, but whether it's the media's fault for actually covering the racist a-holes that have taken over the Republican Party.

When a Michael Steele tries to say that it's only one in a hundred who carry around racist signs about Obama at the psycho town halls, that's a LIE. All you had to do is look at the teabagger protests in DC. Even Andrea Mitchell was stunned.

CNN's Reliable Sources:

Kurtz: Eric Deggans, should the media be devoting all of this time and energy to explaining or examining or exploring whether some of Obama's critics are, in fact, motivated by racism?

ERIC DEGGANS, ST. PETERSBURG TIMES: I think it's an appropriate subject just because for a long time people who have been covering these rallies, covering these protests, have an sense that there's an undercurrent of something that goes beyond just opposing the president politically.

And there's been an effort to try and explain that. Why is there such visceral hatred for what Obama's trying to do among the certain core, a certain percentage of people who are at these rallies and then we found that these weird e-mails pop up of photos of Obama looking like a tribesman, you know, weird racial jokes that seem to be passed along by e-mail by some people who oppose him. So we're trying to explain that, and I think it makes sense to try.

KURTZ: Some of that, of course, may come from the fringes. Amy Holmes, is there a danger that journalists are perhaps insinuating or suggesting or implying that many of Obama's critics must be motivated by racism?

We know some of the racism is coming from the fringes, but now it's bubbling up and overflowing from the fringes to the mainstream. Even CNN's Jon Spellman reported that a dark undercurrent has overtaken the tea-baggers: CNN's Jim Spellman on the teabaggers: There really is a dark undercurrent running through them

Spellman:...we saw handguns from time to time, but running through this subculture that's developed around these tea parties is a bit of a dark undercurrent. The bulk of the people are for lower taxes and less government control, but there really is an element that's got these kind of outlandish conspiracy theories about death camps and about this take over, people comparing President Obama to Hitler. It really is a sizable...It's not just a couple of people around the edges. One of the big questions will be if this movement go forward while maintaining this kind of element on the edges...

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Howard Kurtz asks his panel of the editor of The New York Times Week in Review and The New York Times Book Review Sam Tanenhaus, the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody and the Washington Post's Ceci Connolly what they think of the right wing's preemptive freak out over President Obama's speech to school children last week.

Tanenhaus says it is an indication of what he calls "the death of conservatism" which is the theme and name of his book.

Brody thinks the President has a "perception problem". Hmmmm.... I wonder what might have contributed to that. The media overplaying the right wing screechers that should otherwise be dismissed couldn't have possibly contributed to that, could it David?

And Ceci Connolly says the "media are addicted to conflict". And don't blame them for feeding us crap on a daily basis since that 24 hour news cycle is so hard to fill up. Well here's a thought. Why not fill it with something besides crap? Somehow Amy Goodman manages to find an hours worth of news every day that you guys can't find the time to report on in that 24 hour cycle. Imagine that. I would imagine that a good deal of our readers here at Crooks and Liars could recommend more stories that are worth reporting on than there would be time for in the 24 hour news cycle, even on a "slow day".

I'd like to think that Sam Tanenhaus' observation is the correct one and that this over the top rhetoric does mean the death of the conservative movement, but our "mainstream media" along with a lot of other powerful forces are going to do their best to make sure it doesn't happen any time soon.

Transcript below the fold.

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Howard Kurtz is still playing water carrier for the Bush administration and their WMD lies used to justify invading Iraq and when called out for it by Daniel Ellsberg who says he'll name names as to who in the Bush administration knew better what does he do? Why try to change the subject of course!

Ellsberg is the subject of a new documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers which debuts this week in New York, Los Angeles and at the Toronto Film Festival.

KURTZ: Do you think that the Obama administration is getting as much pressure from the press as it should, particularly compared to previous administrations, say the Bush administration?

ELLSBERG: None. No administration has gotten the pressure that it should from the press on this point. We got into Iraq with as much deceptions as occurred in Vietnam, a generation earlier. A performance by the press no better than we saw of pressing behind the lies of the administration than we got during the Johnson administration when I was in; nor did we get a single person within the administration, the Bush administration now, who saw that the adventure into Iraq was going to hurt our counter-terrorism efforts, hurt our security, and was violating the Constitution in terms of treaties. Another example would be treaties on torture and our domestic laws on torture. People who saw that clearly, not one of them leaked to Congress, or to the press.

(CROSS TALK)

KURTZ: Obviously, there were conflicting opinions and conflicting evidence, for example on WMDs. But let me come back to this.

ELLSBERG: No, pardon me.

KURTZ: Go ahead.

ELLSBERG: When it came to lying -- when it came to lying about the nature of the evidence that the evidence was unequivocal, that was as much of a lie as saying that evidence of the attack on August 4th, on our destroyers, was unequivocal. Yes, there was --

KURTZ: You're comparing the Bush's building of the case to go to war in Iraq, with Lyndon Johnson's Tonkin Gulf war incident, just to be clear.

ELLSBERG: I am, indeed. It's exactly the same in the performance not only by the president, but by all of the people who knew that it was a disaster. And I could name names there, if you want.

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Digby linked to this excellent piece by Edward Wasserman in the Miami Herald the other day and I just got around to reading it. He basically solves the news problem that we face.

You know, like how bogus claims are repeated endlessly throughout the media (like the health bill contains "death panels") and even though they are debunked---the damage is already done.

So this time, when it came to the "death panels," The Washington Post's influential media reporter, Howard Kurtz, observed: "For once, mainstream journalists did not retreat to the studied neutrality of quoting dueling antagonists." Reporters took the additional step of pointing out, on their own authority, that the proposals don't contain any such provision. To "he said, she said," was added: "we say."

Trouble is, it hasn't really mattered. Even though news organizations debunked the claim, 45 percent of respondents to an NBC poll still believe the reforms would indeed allow the federal government to halt treatment to the elderly -- a staggering number.

Why? Maybe because, by Kurtz's count, Palin's "death panels" were mentioned 18 times by his own paper, 16 times in The New York Times and at least 154 times on cable and network news (not including daytime news shows.)

Plainly, refuting a falsehood doesn't keep it from doing harm. The solution isn't some cheap fix, first giving end-of-the-world play to some incendiary fantasy and then inserting a line that says the preceding was utter rubbish. The real problem goes to the core of traditional news practices. As Greg Marx noted in a sensible Columbia Journalism Review posting, the solution is "making a more concerted effort not to disseminate false or dubious claims in the first place."

Isn't that simple? All the media has to do is fact check a story first and present the truth instead of repeating lies over and over again in the interest of "balance". Then we won't have to worry about an ill-informed public not getting the information they need on important issues. Issues that actually have an impact on their lives, like health care. Unfortunately, that appears too much to ask:

As the saying goes, what really matters isn't what people think, it's what they think about: Debunking falsehoods is fine, but the more that news media embrace it as if it's a cure-all, the worse we'll all be. The solution isn't to refute, it's to ignore. End the practice of rewarding the most sensational, the most irresponsible, the most baseless allegations with top-of-the-news billing. The media bury worthwhile news all the time; how about burying the worthless stuff?

There, however, the problem isn't so much with reporters, it's with their bosses, the ones who insist on running the screaming footage from "town meetings," on giving dramatic lies a prominence they don't deserve -- ensuring an audience, but also ensuring the lies a public life no reasoned refutation can end.

"He said, she said" has always been a dubious way to report the world. "We say" helps, but only a little. The real solution is simple: It's called news judgment.

Don't you love that? "News Judgment." What a miraculous concept. I wonder how we could actually make that happen?

Thank Edward for this rare bit of sanity from the media: edward_wasserman@hotmail.com

Journalists are often surprised when they see themselves criticized because they think that they are above it all, but when you see something like this come up in print it makes you just shake your head. Howard Kurtz' newest column portrays Paul Krugman as an Obama cheerleader now being lost over his handling of the health care debate.

A president is going to be smacked around from the moment he takes office and the uplifting rhetoric of campaign rallies meets the gritty reality of governing.

But the criticism of Barack Obama has turned strikingly personal as some of his liberal media allies have gone wobbly on him. After playing a cheer-leading role during the campaign, some are bluntly questioning whether he's up to the job.

If Obama is losing Paul Krugman, can the rest of the left be far behind?

Really, this is who he picks as a cheerleader? Paul Krugman has been analyzing President Obama's choices ever since the primaries began and he was often critical of the then Senator all the way through to his winning the election. Krugman took a lot of heat when he criticized Obama's initial health care plan and he's been outspoken ever since on all issues economic including writing that he thought the stimulus wasn't big enough, but Howard makes it seem like Krugman was an Obama cheerleader right from the start.

Dean Baker caught this earlier today.

Those of you who remember Paul Krugman's often harsh criticisms of Obama during the election campaign might be surprised to read Howard Kurtz's media column which puts him first among the disappointed former Obama cheerleaders. Krugman has certainly been critical of Obama's performance in office, but this is only news for Kurtz, not people familiar with Krugman's writings.

All Villagers aren't wrong in everything they write obviously, certainly not Kurtz, but this latest error is laughable. I can understand if it was a matter of interpretation, but come on Howard, this one wasn't even close to being on the mark. (h/t Atrios)

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In a segment complaining about how his remarks were taken out of context by Jon Stewart, Bill O'Reilly managed to take Ann Kornblut's comments about him...out of context. Jon Stewart pointed out how O'Reilly's views on protesters had changed since right wing protesters had begun appearing at health care town halls. O'Reilly is known for referring to liberal protesters as "loons" but now openly defends the right wing protesters causing distractions at town hall events. O'Reilly complained that Stewart had taken his comments out of context.

CNN's Howard Kurtz points out that O'Reilly is also guilty of the same "unfair editing" that he accused Stewart of doing. O'Reilly used a clip of Ann Kornblut explaining Stewart's criticism of O'Reilly to suggest that she agreed with Jon Stewart. Kornblut had actually provided a mild criticism of Stewart. O'Reilly had selectively edited the Kornblut the clip to fit his agenda.

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Ooops...lol. During Howard Kurtz's tribute to former CNN contributor "The Prince of Darkness" Robert Novak, someone forgot to bleep out his "bullshit" remark.

KURTZ: But it was the battle over the war and his friendship with such sources as Karl Rove that would prove his undoing. Rove was one of two White House sources who told Novak that Valerie Plame, the wife of Bush critic Joe Wilson, was secretly employed by the CIA. And Novak's disclosure of that fact six years ago ignited a firestorm. He was called a traitor and worse.

Novak had little to say publicly about the leak investigation, even as he revealed his confidential sources to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

NOVAK: I don't think I did anything wrong, but as a practical matter, it wasn't a big scoop, you know. It was just a throwaway line, and the whole column was not abusive toward Joe Wilson in any way.

KURTZ: He began to seem a relic of an earlier era. CNN dropped "CROSSFIRE" and "CAPITAL GANG," and at one of his increasingly rare appearances, Novak lost his temper while arguing with James Carville.

JAMES CARVILLE, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: ... is watching you. Show them you're tough.

NOVAK: Well, I think that's bullshit. And I hate that. Just let me go.

ED HENRY, CNN SR. WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: About this Senate race, James, that...

KURTZ: He left the network soon afterwards, joining Fox News, and published his memoir titled, fittingly enough, "The Prince of Darkness."

Thirteen months ago, the man who never seemed to stop arguing was sidelined by cancer.

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Howard Kurtz admits that the media "has fun" covering the pissed off Republicans at the town hall protests. Hey Howard, I didn't think having fun was supposed to be something the media considered when deciding what "news" stories to cover. And no, the coverage has not been fair. There's been very little coverage of these Remote Area Medical events with people lined up for miles and hours on end to get treatments they can't afford.

KURTZ: Jeff Zeleny, is Robert Gibbs right and Obama right that the media are providing a distorted picture of these town halls by focusing on the most confrontational moments?

ZELENY: Well, I think in a sense they are, but in a sense they're not. First, I think, I mean, the images and the passions that were shown this week from town hall meetings show real Americans having real concerns about this. I think that's one of the things that has been left out of this.

I spent most of the week in Iowa going to several town halls. There are real, patriotic voting Americans, some who voted for President Obama, who don't like what they see shaping up as a plan. But...

KURTZ: But is that the whole story?

ZELENY: But it's not the whole story. And I think we have been missing the context of all this

YouTube is fantastic. It takes us everywhere, into town meetings that we couldn't go, but it doesn't give us any context. And that has been a problem this week.

KURTZ: And when I watch cable, Amy Holmes, it almost seem like this endless loop of these loud moments. I mean, there's one woman in a blue dress, Katy Abram, we're going to play later. I've seen her 50 times.

HOLMES: Indeed. And it's perfect for television. You've got the audio, you've got the visuals, you've got the heat and the passion. But there are some loops that have not been played endlessly.

Kenneth Gladney, an African-American gentleman who was at one of these town halls, was beaten up. And yet, he has not been splashed on the front pages. He has gotten less attention than Professor Gates and his arrest at Harvard.

So, I think if you look at conservatives, the context that they are concerned about is the context that this is supposed to marginalize and characterize the entire opposition to health care plan as being fringe and hysterical. And the same treatment is not given to the other side when their folks come out to protest.

KURTZ: And Ruth Marcus, Obama keeps repeating this line about how TV loves a ruckus. And here we just heard Gibbs say the media was disappointed that no one yelled at the president after his first town hall meeting in New Hampshire.

Is there a grain of truth there?

MARCUS: Sure. Look, conflict is more interesting than lack of conflict. When flowers bloom and the sun is shining, it's not necessarily news. And so, we are all going to naturally gravitate to -- we, being the media -- naturally gravitate to the more exciting moments.

And it is more exciting if you're a journalist to have those exciting moments. And I think it's a little naive and a sign of some -- to some extent their -- the way they have been rocked back on their heels to hear the White House complaining about, you know, following the ruckus. They know that.

KURTZ: Right.

HOLMES: This White House complaining about media coverage after Obama being on the cover of "TIME" magazine how many times?

KURTZ: It's really striking though how often Robert Gibbs and the president have complained about the media coverage. And here's a funny note.

When Fox News was breaking away from that first Obama town hall, the anchor, Trace Gallagher, said, "Any contentious questions, anybody yelling, we'll bring it to you." In other words, that would cause them to go back.

Now, Jeff Zeleny, the other night, the "CBS Evening News" led off with a story about 1,500 people lined up in L.A. for a clinic that was providing free health care for a couple days. And it made me think, well, the reason the existing health care system -- we've all kind of gotten away from covering it -- I think news organizations have made an honest effort to try to unravel the complexities of this health care issue. But, let's face it, covering angry, shouting folks is a lot more fun.

ZELENY: No question about that. And that free clinic I think was one example of that. I think we had it on the cover of our paper as well, this week.

But I think if you look at the coverage, what I was struck by, talking to voters and seeing people this week, how well-informed people really were about this. Not necessarily -- all the information was not accurate.

MARCUS: They knew about the death panels?

ZELENY: Well, some, I think -- I think that was another thing that was taken a little bit -- perhaps given more attention than people actually thought. But without question, I think a lot of news organizations are devoting a lot of time to serious coverage of this. But it's a complicated issue. It's impossible to break it down in a long newspaper story, let alone a 60-second TV story.

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You have to believe things are really getting foul out there in cable land when Howard Kurtz -- whose willingness to look the other way when it comes to all kinds of vile and kooky wingnuttery is the stuff of legend -- finally reaches his threshold, as he apparently did Sunday on his 'Reliable Sources' program:

It's getting ugly out there. And by out there, I mean the great cable echo chamber. Six months after Barack Obama took office, the vitriol that often marked the Bush years when Iraq and terror were the driving issues is now being directed at his successor. And apparently, you can say just about anything about the president of the United States and still stay on the air. The national outrage meter doesn't even seem to move very much, so accustomed have we become about incendiary. My personal needle has hit the maximum.

What really pushed Kurtz over the line -- in addition to the Lou Dobbs 'Birther' controversy -- was Glenn Beck's charge that President Obama is a 'racist':

KURTZ: So, is some of this cable commentary getting out of control? Should there be a line you can't cross without getting fired? And why are we still debating the Skip Gates arrest?

Joining us now, Michel Martin, host of "Tell Me More" on National Public Radio; Amanda Carpenter, reporter and columnist for "The Washington Times"; and Michelle Cottle, senior editor of "The New Republic." Michel Martin, is calling the president a racist, not saying that he made a racist statement, but that he hates White people, is that simply out of bounds?

MARTIN: Yes.

KURTZ: And yet, there doesn't seem to be any great uproar about it.

MARTIN: I don't know. That's the part that surprises me a little. But there's a lot -- I guess it would be funny if it weren't so -- and here's a word that we've heard a lot of lately -- stupid.

I mean, here is a man who has a white mother, here is a man who was raised by two white grandparents who obviously adored him and who he adores. Here's a man who's better at so-called "white culture" than Glenn Beck is, and yet we have to hear this kind of commentary. It's quite remarkable.

Kurtz goes on to wonder how Beck and the rest of the inflammatory right-wing pundit class gets away this:

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