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Jane Hall

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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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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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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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