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From Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz hosts a panel discussion on Lou Dobbs departure from CNN. I guess Howard thinks bringing in bullying, right wing, Rush Limbaugh wanna-be hack Chris Plante to concern troll for Dobbs somehow made this panel "balanced". All it did was make it ridiculous.

Plante uses an extremely broad brush to throw around accusations of "liberal" media bias. Anyone think Campbell Brown who's married to Dan Senor is a "liberal". Or that Larry King is an "opinion show"? Or that Chip Reid is any less of a Villager hack than the rest of them out there just because he worked for Joe Biden? Or George Stephanopoulos because he worked for Clinton but subjects us to endless interviews with McCain since he lost the election and George Will's sour mug every week? Liberal my ass. Plante also defends Dobbs for both his anti-immigrant rants and birther rhetoric.

Transcript via CNN.

KURTZ: Chris Plante, many liberals cheering Dobbs' sudden exit. A "New York Times" editorial called him close to a right wing ranter who distorts the facts. Is the media being fair to Lou Dobbs?

PLANTE: Well, of course not. Well the reason Lou Dobbs was in trouble is not because he has opinions, it's because of what his opinions were and his opinions are out of lockstep with the rest of the mainstream news media. "The New York Times" in their -- pretty much every report also say that he's a crusader against immigrants, or immigration and that's false. It's a misrepresentation and it speaks to their point of view. And maybe "The New York Times" should be taking a look at itself rather than Lou Dobbs.

KURTZ: Eric Deggans, Dobbs for years was a conventional business anchor, but do you believe in recent years that he became more of a crusader than a journalist?

DEGGANS: I think it's obvious and I could not disagree more with your previous panelist's assertions. It became obvious that Lou was pressing this world view about illegal immigration being at the root of a ton of evils in America, and I think a lot of his conclusions were debatable.

"60 Minutes" exposed that he had said things about illegal immigrants causing a rise in leprosy in the United States that just could not be backed up. And he's also made assertions of the criminality of illegal immigrants that statistics just don't bear out. So opinions are one thing, but to be unfair and to make assertions that are not true or to exaggerate using selective data, that is just not something that's very ethical and very fair or anything that helps anyone.

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David Neiwert posted about David Zurawik's frothy appearance with Howard Kurtz last weekend as he bashed MSNBC. On 'Reliable Sources,' David Zurawik decries heated cable talk by shrieking about MSNBC's 'fascism'

Zurawik felt compelled to explain himself in a little more detail online.

As you can see from the video, I am harder on MSNBC than Fox, because this NBC sister channel has outrageously decided it doesn't have to cover news on weekends and holidays -- and yet, still calls itself a news channel.I have to admit, it is a great business moldel: Don't cover the news. let someone fulfill that expensive task. We'll just put on ideologues like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow and let them mock our opponents as we opine about the news that others like CNN went to trouble and expense of gathering and verifying.

He's upset because they choose to run some of those Locked Up episodes during the weekend, really? Here's a little info for Z: MSNBC does cover the news on the weekends, they just don't do it 24/7. He should probably check their schedule sometime before making the claim that they don't cover the news on Saturday and Sunday. And WTF does that have to do with how they cover the news in general or if they are biased in their reporting? Which is worse, showing some non-news shows on the weekend, or pushing a political agenda 24 hours a day, seven days a week for as many years as they've been on the air?

Fox News tries to shrug off their right-wing bias by saying they have opinion talking heads, so they don't consider those shows to be news. But if anyone -- and that means you, David -- were to watch Fox News, starting with Fox and Friends right up through Neil Cavuto, you would see a right-wing bias that would make your head spin -- all dressed up as news reporting. Heavy anti-union messages, insane free-market Wall Streeters and anti-Obama segments dominate their coverage, but somehow Z isn't outraged by that behavior as much.

Sure, MSNBC's opinion lineup, from Hardball to Maddow is largely center-left commentators, but they start their mornings with three hours of Joe Scarborough before going into seven straight hours of news blocks that for the most part interview politicians from both parties along with the usual battle of the consultants. Andrea Mitchell has her own hour and you can't call her a lefty.

So while I agree with some of Z's complaints, please get some basic facts straight. And his criticism of MSNBC gives us a look into the window of the mind of a Villager critic.

And yes, these cable shows have hurt America, because they are always looking for a "conflict" which will increase ratings rather than examine the news and issues at hand with an emphasis to inform us rather than persuade of. This approach aided Bush and Cheney in their quest to go and invade Iraq, and look where that has taken us: Thousands dead, innocents lost, billions of dollars spent, torture, military commissions and wiretapping soon followed. Good job, cable news.

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Countdown's Worst Persons for May 26, 2009. Winner Laura Ingraham. Runners up David Zurawik and Pete Hegseth.

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If you want an example of how "centrism" is its own specially blinkered ideology, check out the rant from David Zurawik, the Baltimore Sun's media critic, yesterday on CNN's Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz:

OLBERMANN: You saved no one, Mr. Cheney. All you did was help kill Americans.

In the name of God, go.

(END VIDEO CLIP) KURTZ: David Zurawik, what do you make of a cable culture where some of these anchors and hosts get really, really mad, or upset or emotional, and it seems to work for them?

ZURAWIK: Howie, they're speaking for a visceral response. And honestly -- I don't want to overstate this, Howie, and you know from time to time I do -- risk that. But it's really that path lies fascism.

I mean, what we need as a democracy is reliable information. This is the opposite of it.

And by the way, that clip of Olbermann just really, I think, encapsulates it. This is a bizarro world or cartoon version of Edward R. Murrow with the cadence and this arch rhetoric and all this, but he is saying madman stuff.

So, heated debate is the sign of fascism? Sounds like Zurawick has been reading Jonah Goldberg.

A clue for David Zurawick: Keith Olbermann may have been contentious and even tendentious, but there's a factual case behind his observations that Dick Cheney likely did not save any lives -- after all, 3,000 Americans died on his watch on 9/11, and there is simply no public evidence whatsoever that the measures he enacted afterward actually thwarted any serious terrorist acts -- and his actions in promoting the invasion of Iraq in fact cost thousands of American lives, and over a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians' lives.

That's called robust debate. Fascism, on the other hand, entails the antithesis of debate -- it argues for the elimination of the opposition, not engagement. And it acts accordingly. When we see Keith Olbermann organizing or simply encouraging street thugs to go out and beat up Dick Cheney and his supporters, then he might have a legitimate concern about fascism.

Moreover, there's nothing quite as overheated, as contentious and tendentious, as calling people fascists, is there? -- particularly when you use the term as carelessly and thoughtlessly as Zurawick does here. Hello, pot, meet kettle.

But the really bizarre aspect of this is that Zurawick is really most upset about MSNBC in general, who he attacked throughout the segment (he doesn't like their weekend fill-in programming, but exactly what kind of media critic tries to claim that fill-in programming is evidence that MSNBC doesn't staff its national bureaus? Besides an utterly ignorant one, that is?).

Moreover, Zurawick seems to think the MSNBC invented the ideologically leaning opinion-news format that has him so worked up:

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