Howie The Putz Demands Affirmative Action

Howie has answered my open letter (not literally) by demanding affirmative action for conservatives, as a remedy for decades of discrimination:

A second major issue was whether hiring a conservative activist as a blogger was a reasonable stab at "balance" when there was no self-proclaimed liberal blogging away, as opposed to left-leaning journalists. I think that's a fair point, but I don't want to see washingtonpost.com or any other MSM outfit abandon efforts to include voices from the right.

And that brings me to the larger question: Do the hiring practices of big newspapers, magazines, networks and Web sites tilt toward people of the liberal persuasion, thereby requiring hand-wringing about intellectual diversity? ...

...

I hope that more people with conservative, free-market or libertarian viewpoints decide to go into mainstream journalism to balance those of more liberal persuasions. But we can't force that to happen if that's not their goal.

I hope that the hallucinogens Howie is taking are not habit forming.

Kurtz cites not a single instance of a supposedly liberal journalist writing straight news with a liberal slant. Nor does he identify any "left-leaning journalists" writing tainted news in the pages of the Post, or on the post dot com. Nor does he present any evidence of any paper hiring reporters based on their political bias.

(Kurtz does cite the idiots at RealClearPolitics, who assert that the Washington Post and New York Times regularly publish the sloppy seconds of The Washington Monthly and The New Republic. Why, yes. Charles Krauthammer, Michael Kelly, Midget Mickey Kaus, and Jimmy "the Turf" Glassman come immediately to mind.)

And he completely avoids mentioning the right-wing spew living large on the Post's editorial pages and opinion columns.

At bottom, Kurtz's argument is dishonest because he ignores all of the "MSM" outlets with openly right-wing agendas and/or right-wing hacks posing as reporters: the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, the New York Post and the rest of Murdoch empire, NBC/MSNBC, U.S. News and many more. By defining "the MSM" as including only the New York Times and WaPo -- and pretending those papers skew left -- Kurtz assumes a media bias that doesn't exist and then demands affirmative action for his pals on the right. A hacktacular display!

p.s. -- Stop bothering Kurtz about Red Sonja; he's bored silly already.

Update: Someone very close to Kurtz also wants to see more "right-leaning journalists" "join the mainstream press."