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CNN's show "Reliable Sources" with host Howard Kurtz seems to try and come off as an unbiased balance look at the media.

It was...a pure Roger Ailes production—and the latest sign that the Fox News chairman is quietly repositioning America’s dominant cable-news channel. Hours before last week’s presidential debate in Orlando, Ailes’s anchors sat in a cavernous back room, hunched over laptops, and plotted how to trap the candidates. Chris Wallace said he would aim squarely at Rick Perry’s weakness: “How do you feel about being criticized by some of your rivals as being too soft on illegal immigration? Then I go to Rick Santorum: is Perry too soft?” “That’s going to get some fireworks going,” said managing editor Bill Sammon, grinning....

...But there was never anything silly, nor light-hearted, nor casual, about Barack Obama's efforts to keep the public's eyes from the basic facts of his life, from birth to his candidacy for president. On the contrary, this opacity is a deliberate policy. Why? The presumptive answer, absent testimony from those involved, is to ensure that real facts interfere as little as possible with the image and narrative that he and his associates have carefully crafted for him. Distinguishing between reality and that narrative would require above all a skeptical attitude, sure to be characterized by Democrats and the media in...

The deafening roar of nothingness emerging from the Sarah Palin email trove points up the media’s hypocritical lack of interest in Barack Obama’s pre-presidential record. Just as Palin’s emails were released, Slate’s David Weigel pointed out that Barack Obama’s State Senate records are not available. Weigel quotes Obama’s statement to the effect that he didn’t have the staff or financial resources to preserve office paperwork. As a result, Obama claims, his State Senate records may have been thrown out.

Our guest today is Stanley Kurtz, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor for National Review Online. He has also written for National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, Policy Review, and Commentary. He is the author of the new book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. See Part 1 of the interview below:

HAWAII GROUND REPORT: Could Hawaiian Governor Neil Abercrombie not be as incompetent and foolish as he appears, but orchestrating a deliberate birth certificate recovery dead end to cover his own papakole? UPDATED: Mystery solved! Reason Obama will not release birth certificate is because his name is legally written “Barry Soetoro” on it Here’s an interesting Ground Report from Hawaii that contains an ingenious theory about Hawaiian Governor Neil Abercrombie’s bizarre backtrack on releasing Obama’s birth certificate. Remember, Abercrombie promised that once he was elected Governor he would prove Obama’s birth certificate existed because he would march down to the Hall...

Howard Kurtz has quite a correction today! It seems that Howie mistakenly believed he was interviewing a Congressman, when in fact he was speaking to the Congressman's spokesperson. Weirder: Kurtz waited more than a month to correct the story. [Updated] In late November, Kurtz wrote a story in The Daily Beast about "tough-talking" Republican Rep. Darrell Issa. The story was based on what Kurtz thought was a phone interview with Issa. But it turns out that, no, Kurtz had actually been speaking to Issa's spokesman, Kurt Bardella, the entire time. Hate when that happens! Today, Kurtz writes: On Nov. 29,...

In a nearly eight-minute video, Sarah Palin says “journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence.” Howard Kurtz on her un-presidential move.The talk in political circles has been that Sarah Palin had a rare opportunity in the wake of the Tucson tragedy to reach out beyond her base and recalibrate her image beyond that of a gun-toting mama grizzly.After all, the strategists said, there was some sympathy for her—beyond the Palin-haters—for being tied to the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, even if she had erred with her “reload” talk and...

In 1983, authors Rael Jean and Erich Isaac published “The Coercive Utopians” (Regnery). They demonstrated how, after the end of the Vietnam War and the abrogation of the draft, the radicals of the New Left of the sixties turned their attention to careers in academia, law, journalism, and “community action” projects in religious, environmental, anti-nuclear energy, and social service institutions. On April one of that year, a twenty one year old senior at Columbia University named Barack Obama attended the “Socialist Scholars Conference” in New York City’s Cooper Union, which had been touted as a meeting “In honor of Karl...

On Sunday’s Reliable Sources, CNN host Howard Kurtz pressed guest Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post on her hypocrisy for calling for more civility in political discourse even while she is a regular guest on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown show on MSNBC. Huffington claimed that Fox News was worse and more inaccurate than MSNBC, and rationalized her appearances with Olbermann by giving him credit for a lame apology the MSNBC host once addressed to Jon Stewart after Stewart called him out for viciously attacking Republican Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts.

Howard Kurtz, a three-decade veteran of The Washington Post who came to embody insider Washington media reporting with his weekly column and CNN television show, is leaving The Post for Tina Brown’s news and commentary Web site, The Daily Beast. It was a twist that few in the media world saw coming, with Mr. Kurtz’s pride in his ink-stained heritage (he likes to say his newspaper career began delivering The New York Post as a boy), and Ms. Brown’s ambitions of upending the old media hierarchy. But Mr. Kurtz said the time had come to move on. And The Post,...

It is a seismic shift, at least throughout the narrow landscape of press insiders. Howard Kurtz, the longtime dean of print media critics, has left his throne at The Washington Post to become Washington bureau chief of the Daily Beast, an online publication that bears the motto "Read this, skip that."

Howard Kurtz on Sunday smacked down liberal talk radio host Bill Press for saying the Park Service allowing Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" event at the Lincoln Memorial was like "granting al Qaeda permission to hold a rally on September 11th at Ground Zero." Towards the end of the opening segment of CNN's "Reliable Sources," Kurtz surprisingly brought up last Friday's disgraceful editing job by ABC's "Good Morning America" that Beck himself said was like something Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels would have done. When finished with this admonishment, Kurtz went right after Press who was seated directly in front of him...

In an August 2 editorial the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz cried a river over the rancor he saw in today's media calling it a "nastiness index" that continues to rise. But his lament is not only off base in many ways, it is also historically illiterate and is built on only one real complaint: the left no longer has a lock on what is considered newsworthy. Kurtz starts off with this lament: "Media outlets, which once merely chronicled this era of hyper-partisanship, now seem to be both the purveyors and often the targets of ugly attacks." Kurz sadly says that...

As other media outlets have given Helen Thomas the kid glove treatment in light of her "trailblazing" career, media consumers may be forgiven for assuming that Helen Thomas's anti-Israel, arguably anti-Semitic comments were an aberration in an otherwise unblemished career of assertive but fair journalism. To his credit, Washington Post's media reporter Howard Kurtz made note of other incidents, such as the time Thomas blamed Israel for inspiring "99 percent" of terrorism and the time in 2002 when she exclaimed "Thank God for Hezbollah," the Iran-backed terror group that murdered 241 U.S. servicement in 1983

I'm increasingly convinced that Sarah Palin is running to head a media empire rather than a presidential campaign. On that front, she is nothing short of an extraordinary success. She's got a multi-year gig at Fox News. She just signed a deal with Discovery's TLC for a documentary about her native Alaska. Her memoir was a runaway bestseller. --snip-- For now, Palin takes an obvious delight in tweaking the very media establishment that is fueling her fame. At a rally in Nevada, she took aim (sorry) at news reports that she might be encouraging threats against Democrats by calling on...

A handful of advertisers, such as Apple, have abandoned Fox altogether. Network executives say they believe they could charge higher rates if the host were more widely acceptable to advertisers.

Three days after calling health-care reform a debacle for the Republicans, David Frum was forced out of his job at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday. The ouster also came one day after a harsh Wall Street Journal editorial about the former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, which said that he "now makes his living as the media's go-to basher of fellow Republicans" and accused him of "peddling bad revisionist history." Frum made clear in a letter to AEI President Arthur Brooks that his departure after seven years at the conservative think tank was not voluntary. "I have had...

The executive editor of the National Enquirer says he plans to enter his paper's work on the John Edwards scandal for a Pulitzer Prize. Don't laugh. "It's clear we should be a contender for this," Barry Levine said by phone Thursday, hours after the former presidential candidate admitted what the paper had been reporting all along: that he is the father of Rielle Hunter's baby. "The National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid, was able to publish this reporting." While the staff never doubted its reports that Edwards had fathered a daughter with his former campaign videographer, Levine said, "there is vindication,...

The executive editor of the National Enquirer says he plans to enter his paper's work on the John Edwards scandal for a Pulitzer Prize. Don't laugh. "It's clear we should be a contender for this," Barry Levine said by phone Thursday, hours after the former presidential candidate admitted what the newspaper had been reporting all along: that he is the father of Rielle Hunter's baby. "The National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid, was able to publish this reporting." Although the staff never doubted its reports that Edwards had fathered a baby girl with his former campaign videographer, Levine said, "there is...

Sarah Palin, who regularly rips the media, is becoming a television pundit at a place where she's likely to feel at home. A Fox News executive says the network will shortly announce that the former vice-presidential nominee is signing on as a contributor. Palin, who resigned as governor of Alaska last summer, will appear as a commentator on various Fox shows. She will also host an occasional program that will examine inspirational tales involving ordinary Americans. Palin will join Mike Huckabee as a Fox contributor who was also involved in the 2008 campaign. The exposure can only help Palin if...

To Bob Woodward, it was the modern-day equivalent of the Pentagon Papers. But to Obama administration officials, the classified assessment of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan represented, if published by The Washington Post, a potential threat to the safety of U.S. troops. The result was that The Post agreed to a one-day delay in publishing the report by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, and that the paper's top editor engaged in a lengthy discussion Sunday with three top Defense Department officials in a meeting at the Pentagon... Woodward said in an interview Tuesday...

<p>A provocative full-page newspaper ad from Fox News drew heated reactions from its rivals today and one demand that The Washington Post apologize for running it.</p> <p>Over photos of protesters gathering for an "anti-tax" rally in Washington last Saturday, the ad asked: "How Did ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN Miss This Story?"</p>

For once, mainstream journalists did not retreat to the studied neutrality of quoting dueling antagonists. They tried to perform last rites on the ludicrous claim about President Obama's death panels, telling Sarah Palin, in effect, you've got to quit making things up. But it didn't matter. The story refused to die. The crackling, often angry debate over health-care reform has severely tested the media's ability to untangle a story of immense complexity. In many ways, news organizations have risen to the occasion; in others they have become agents of distortion. But even when they report the facts, they have had...

For once, mainstream journalists did not retreat to the studied neutrality of quoting dueling antagonists.They tried to perform last rites on the ludicrous claim about President Obama's death panels, telling Sarah Palin, in effect, you've got to quit making things up. But it didn't matter. The story refused to die. The crackling, often angry debate over health-care reform has severely tested the media's ability to untangle a story of immense complexity...even when they report the facts, they have had trouble influencing public opinion. In the 10 days after Palin warned on Facebook of an America "in which my parents or...

For once, mainstream journalists did not retreat to the studied neutrality of quoting dueling antagonists. They tried to perform last rites on the ludicrous claim about President Obama's death panels, telling Sarah Palin, in effect, you've got to quit making things up. But it didn't matter. The story refused to die. The crackling, often angry debate over health-care reform has severely tested the media's ability to untangle a story of immense complexity. In many ways, news organizations have risen to the occasion; in others they have become agents of distortion. But even when they report the facts, they have had...

Dan Rather is wrong. Barack Obama should stay out of it. We don't need no stinkin' presidential commission. It's not that the former CBS anchor has delivered a flawed diagnosis. The news business, as Rather wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, is in deep trouble, particularly the print side. But his prescription -- that only high-level White House involvement can draw sufficient attention to the media's plight -- badly misses the mark. This president may be able to bring Henry Louis Gates and James Crowley together for a beer...But rescuing the news business is beyond his power... But the challenge...

Here is video of Howard Kurtz, host of CNN's Reliable Sources, reviewing the history of the Keith Olbermann - Bill O'Reilly blood feud that has been going on for years now. Kurtz had reported previously that there was some kind of deal in the works to get the two to tone it down (denied by Olbermann), but as Kurtz reports, both are back to full steam ahead in hammering each other on a regular basis. . . . . (Watch Video)

Here is video of White House Aide Linda Douglass on Reliable Sources today defending her attack on a video showing President Obama in his own words saying he wants to move America to a single-payer system. Douglass called the video "disinformation," when actually it simply used Obama's own words against him. Even Reliable Sources Host Howard Kurtz said he was "skeptical" that using a person's own words could be called "disinformation." Kurtz also challenged Douglass on the White House's solicitation of citizens to send in examples of opposition to Government Health Care via email. She denied that the White House...

It was never intended to be a cease-fire. The best that the men who run two of the nation's media giants were hoping to achieve was a ratcheting down of the rhetoric between their warring commentators. But Keith Olbermann refused to play along this week... Immelt detailed his grievances. His elderly parents in Cincinnati, he said, watch O'Reilly every night... But the war was just beginning at MSNBC... The day after Olbermann's comments about the Tiller slaying, executives convened a large meeting and talked about Fox and the importance of striking the right on-air tone. Olbermann later expressed a willingness...

On July 22, 2009, President Obama held one of the most boring news conferences in the history of televised presidential events. For nearly 50 minutes, he blathered on about private and public health care plans, red pills and blue pills, costs and benefits. In the last five minutes of the conference, he made his controversial comments about Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge, Mass., police department -- but by that time, everyone watching was either drifting into sleep or totally comatose. So why did ABC, NBC, and CBS broadcast this atrocious, narcolepsy-inducing ode to arrogance in the midst of prime...

Media Bias: Is it just us or is there something wrong with the White House dictating news coverage to advance the president's medical insurance agenda? We thought this sort of thing happened only in Venezuela.In an unprecedented intervention by government in private media, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel called all three TV networks and muscled them into giving President Obama prime time coverage for his medical expansion program. For some, Emanuel didn't bother with mere newsmen. He went straight to the top, calling corporate owners such as Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger, whose company controls ABC, and General...

David Axelrod's son is following his father's career path -- that is, the one he had before becoming a political strategist. Ethan Axelrod is joining the Huffington Post, the liberal Web site that has been largely supportive of President Obama. His dad, now a White House senior adviser, was a Chicago Tribune reporter until he quit in 1984 to help run a Senate campaign (and still has a soft spot for newspapers, though his old one is in bankruptcy). "I've been interested in journalism for a while," the 22-year-old Axelrod said Tuesday. "I heard through my father that they were...

She survived Katie Couric and Tina Fey, searing scrutiny, rumors about her baby, anonymous taunts of "whack job" from those who once touted her credentials to be a heartbeat away. Yesterday Sarah Palin completed a remarkable media flameout that made her one of the most famous women in the world, the exotic Alaska caribou hunter, one of the most revered and reviled politicians in modern history. The governor announced she is calling it quits, just eight months after she and John McCain went down to defeat. She has nursed a grudge against mainstream journalists, accusing them of peddling "gossip and...

The New York Times won five Pulitzer Prizes yesterday, including one for uncovering the prostitution scandal that forced Eliot L. Spitzer (D) to resign as New York governor, while Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson captured the prize for commentary for his writing about the campaign that led to Barack Obama's election....

Ignores his own network's bimbo eruption (Susan Roesgen).

And he talks about it on his own CNN show.

On last Sunday's "Reliable Sources," I made a last-minute decision to add an item about Bristol Palin's ex-boyfriend -- not because I'm particularly fascinated by the ex-boyfriend, mind you, but because Sarah Palin had just ripped Levi Johnston apart.

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Having mastered the Hollywood gossip scene, celebrity site TMZ apparently has set its sights on a new conquest — Capitol Hill. The site — owned by Time Warner, CNN’s parent company — has started accosting members of Congress, including Illinois Republican Rep. Aaron Schock, as they go about their work in Washington. “I didn’t know what was going on,” Schock said of his first encounter with TMZ. “I was on my way to the floor for a vote, I’m talking to a constituent literally on my cell phone and there’s some guy with a handycam in street...

In the midst of a segment on Rush Limbaugh on Sunday morning's Reliable Sources portion of CNN's State of the Union, host Howard Kurtz scolded his journalistic colleagues for a remark which “totally got missed by the media,” how CNN host D.L. Hughley charged “that the Republican convention 'literally looks like Nazi Germany.' I don't understand how he can get away with saying that. I think that is an outrage.”

Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper recalls getting "a feeling in the pit of my stomach" when he learned that the Rocky Mountain News was shutting down. "Even when they were uncovering corruption in the city, even when they were embarrassing us or causing us discomfort, they were making the city better," he says. "It's a huge loss." The grim echoes of the nearly 150-year-old paper's demise Friday could be heard in newsrooms and communities across the country. Although the Denver Post will still cover Hickenlooper's region, some cities -- most notably San Francisco -- are facing the prospect of life...

Here is video of media analyst Bernard Goldberg taking the Mainstream Media to task for being activists in favor of Barack Obama during the 2008 election. He is talking with Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz, and says what every thinking American knows is true -- the media set out to elect Barack Obama as President. Kurtz tries to defend the media with several lame attempts, but Goldberg effectively hammers home the reality that if the media had scrutinized Obama's relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright early in the campaign, as they should have, Obama would have never been nominated and would...

The growing exodus of mainstream reporters from the nation's capital has ceded much of the turf to a new, more specialized kind of journalism. Just as newspaper, magazine and television bureaus here are shrinking or shutting down at the dawn of the Obama administration, high-priced newsletters and trade publications are filling the breach. Climate Wire, an online newsletter launched last year, now has more Washington staffers -- 10 -- than Hearst Newspapers. "This dramatically changes what gets covered and how," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which surveys the new landscape in a report released...

I'm not an economist, but when Tim Geithner unveils his long-awaited bailout plan and the Dow plunges nearly 400 points, that's probably not a good sign. Most people have been scratching their heads about the Bush bailout. How could we have spent half the $700 billion and yet the banks still aren't lending? They're sitting on the cash or buying other banks and paying bonuses? Where did the money go? Against that backdrop, the last thing the Obama administration needed was complaints that its plan didn't provide enough details. But that was the overwhelming reaction. "Critical details of the plan...

President-elect Barack Obama has offered the job of surgeon general to Sanjay Gupta, the neurosurgeon and correspondent for CNN and CBS, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation. Gupta has told administration officials that he wants the job, and the final vetting process is under way. He has asked for a few days to figure out the financial and logistical details of moving his family from Atlanta to Washington but is expected to accept the offer. When reached for comment today, Gupta did not deny the account but declined to comment. The offer followed a two-hour Chicago meeting...

MRS. BUSH: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this White House for this special occasion -- the presentation of the National Medals of the Arts and the National Humanities Medals. These medals recognize great contributions to art, music, theater, literature, history, and general scholarship. Congratulations to all of this year's recipients, and to the proud family members and loved ones who are here with you this afternoon -- we're happy to have you all. *snip* For more than 40 years, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities have inspired our creativity and helped shape our...

What makes this piece by Howard Kurtz so remarkably stupid is that he is supposed to be the media critic for the Washington Post and he never saw this kind of slavish devotion to Obama during the campaign? What's troubling here goes beyond the clanging of cash registers. Media outlets have always tried to make a few bucks off the next big thing. The endless campaign is over, and there's nothing wrong with the country pulling together, however briefly, behind its new leader. But we seem to have crossed a cultural line into mythmaking. "The Obamas' New Life!" blares People's...

After hearing about Barack Obama’s ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Fr. Michael Pfleger, and the militant activists of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), it should be clear to everyone that his extremist roots run deep. But the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has yet another connection with the world of far-Left radicalism. Obama has long been linked — through foundation grants, shared political activism, collaboration on legislation and tactics, and mutual praise and support — with the Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation, one of the least known yet most influential national umbrella groups for...

-snip- "The media still misunderstand and, to a great degree, still misrepresent polls," veteran pollster John Zogby says. "It's a cliche, but what we offer is a snapshot in time. We don't predict, can't predict." He says the greatest differences among pollsters are the way they select and weight their voter samples. Zogby, for instance, reports figures only for likely voters -- which requires projections based on turnout models -- while others include all registered voters or all adults. -snip- The punditry about Palin also sends a not-so-subtle signal. New Republic columnists have been arguing about whether the Alaska governor...

Fifty-seven percent of the print and broadcast stories about the Republican nominee were decidedly negative, the Project for Excellence in Journalism says in a report out today, while 14 percent were positive. Obama's coverage was more balanced during the six-week period from Sept. 8 through last Thursday, with 36 percent of the stories clearly positive, 35 percent neutral or mixed and 29 percent negative.