. . . But wait a minute, I thought, this couldn’t be the same Rachel Sklar who ferociously trashed Howard Kurtz and the key ideas in his book back last year? Could there be two Rachel Sklars, both writing for Huffington Post? Am I hallucinating? So I went back and pulled up the writing of evil-twin-Rachel Sklar. And there it was, just as I remember it. Sklar describes an episode of Kurtz’s CNN show which, as it turns out, provides the core thesis of his new book:
[M]y mouth literally dropped open when halfway through the program, Kurtz came out with this:
“Coming up in the next half hour of “Reliable Sources”: with rising casualties in Iraq and sinking poll numbers, is the president having a terrible year, or are the media just making it seem that way?”
Excuse me? Is this dude on drugs? The framing of this question is so biased, so skewed, and such a blatant, scapegoating stretch that I genuinely can’t believe Kurtz had the audacity to say it on the air in a show with the word “reliable” in it. This is even worse blame-the-media-mongering than his recent adoption of the journalists-are-ignoring-good-news-from-Iraq argument, for which he got a well-deserved smackdown from CBS’ Lara Logan. Why? Because it’s actually the SAME blame-the-media-mongering that he’s been pushing, except now instead of being blamed for bad news in Iraq Kurtz is blaming his fellow journalists for bad news about the Bush Administration. . . .
. . . Sometime between last June and the first week of October, “is this dude on drugs” turned into “exciting,” “juicy” and “wonderful.” Now that’s a remarkable odyssey.
What might have happened? Well, cruising through the records of Kurtz’s program and his column, I found something interesting. First, it seems, Rachel Sklar was invited to Kurtz’s show as a guest, showing up in transcripts several times in the course of this past summer. Second, Howie wrote a piece about Sklar in his column at the Washington Post. It’s an over-the-top puff piece filled with product placement, which makes clear that Kurtz paid a call on Sklar in her office in New York.
. . . Kurtz’s headline tells it all: “A Blog That Made It Big.” Of course, the blog features everything that Kurtz loves: hard left politics, anti-war rhetoric, feminist perspectives, and acid criticism of Howard Kurtz . . . or it did. Is it cynical to be suspicious of the dealings that produced a love-fest between Rachel Sklar and Howard Kurtz? Or perhaps it’s just an unreasonable expectation–namely, critics who are actually critical.
The evidence is extremely damning of Ms. Sklar.
