Howard Kurtz's pathetic self-delusion: Slams CBS on Benghazi, but ignores Fox!

Fox News critic bashes bogus 60 Minutes report, declines to even mention that Fox regularly relied on same source

Published November 19, 2013 4:52PM (EST)

Howard Kurtz               (Fox News)
Howard Kurtz (Fox News)

This post originally appeared on The BRAD BLOG.

Over the weekend, new Fox "News" lamestream media warrior Howard Kurtz was appropriately critical of the pathetic "apology" CBS' 60 Minutes offered for their bogus Benghazi report which was based entirely on a lying "witness" to the September 2012 attack. (The guy was never there, the story was completely made up.)

Fox doesn't seem to allow their videos to be embedded, but you can watch Kurtz' :97 second piece on "Why 60 Minutes apology isn't enough" right here.

While Kurtz is correct that CBS' "apology" was not nearly enough, and that the serious error requires a much more thorough investigation into and explanation for how rightwing correspondent Lara Logan was so easily fooled by her source, and why nobody at 60 Minutes kept the false story from being aired in the first place, Kurtz completely fails to even mention one very important point. Fox "News" itself used the very same source for the basis of its own false narrative in its own series of misleading stories last year. Moreover, Fox, unlike CBS, has failed to even retract those similarly bogus reports, much less apology or investigate any of them...

As Washington Post media blogger Eric Wemple noted on November 8th, while the CBS story was in its final throes of complete collapse earlier this month, Fox relied on the very same lying "Blue Mountain Security manager", the central figure of the 60 Minutes report, as one of their own sources for reportage on whatever pretend "scandal" that both Fox and the GOP have been on about for more than a year in regard to the Benghazi tragedy.

The Fox reporter for those stories, Adam Housley, even admitted after the 60 Minutes story ran that he had used the same man, Dylan Davies (identified pseudonymously as "Morgan Jones" in the bogus CBS report) as a source until he "stopped speaking to him when he asked for money."

In the same report, before the complete collapse of the 60 Minutes story, Housley nonetheless went on to say that the CBS story "once again kind of reaffirm[ed]" his and the network's prior reporting on Benghazi. That, despite the fact that reams of reporting from other outlets, and documentation from the State Dept., as Wemple notes, all confirm that the Fox reporting from their Blue Mountain Security source (Davies) was incorrect. Oh, and, of course, the fact that Davies has since been revealed to have been lying about the entire story from the jump.

Kurtz appropriately called for a proper investigation of the CBS News failure. The once-great networks' laughable plan to have an underling of CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager investigate the failure at 60 Minutes --- a CBS News program Executive Produced by Jeff Fager --- is a joke. But Kurtz failed, in his righteous Fox "News"Media Buzz indignation, to even mention Fox' own reports, still standing, from the very same source, much less call for a retraction of those stories or for a full investigation about how his own network could be a) fooled by the very same source and b) still offering those reports (without even an editors note) on their own website.

Apparently, "media critic" Kurtz only bothers critiquing certain networks. Fox, once again, gets a full pass from the buffoonish Kurtz and his traveling, chronically wrongconsistently embarrassing "media critic" clown show.

Despite a number of attempts to get comment from Kurtz via Twitter, he failed to reply to any of them.

Wemple tells The BRAD BLOG that, similarly, Fox itself never bothered to reply to his own request for comment for his Washington Post story either, though, he notes, "Fox did say it stood by its Benghazi stuff."


By Brad Friedman

Investigative journalist and broadcaster Brad Friedman is the creator and publisher of The BRAD Blog. He has contributed to Mother Jones, The Guardian, Truthout, Huffington Post, The Trial Lawyer magazine and Editor & Publisher.

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Related Topics ------------------------------------------

60 Minutes Benghazi Cbs Cbs News Fox News Howard Kurtz Lara Logan Media Criticism