Stanley Kurtz, the Obama Campaign, and Radio

I promised David Heddle a post about the Stanley Kurtz interview incident. And I wrote one just now that WordPress ate due to an expired session cookie. I need to learn to always select all and copy before hitting “Publish”. So here is a short version…

Kurtz should get to have his say. Obama supporters should get to tell Kurtz he’s wrong. They should also get to tell the publisher and the publisher’s commercial supporters that they don’t approve of the association being made. A private group can even say so before the association is completed. But a government entity, such as an expected Obama administration, would be urging prior restraint if they tried to limit who gets media access, and that would be wrong. They can rebut the arguments on their merits, and/or sue the loonies who cross over into slander or libel, but we certainly don’t need further government interference with free speech. That’s not the change we need.

The Chicago Tribune analysis is pretty much spot-on:

The grass-roots response was weak. Most pro-Obama callers seemed only to have skimmed the talking points in the e-mail, and they sputtered when challenged with follow-up questions.

The perverse effect was to make Kurtz seem sympathetic and credible—the victim of an unfair attack from raging, incoherent would-be censors working on behalf of a cowardly campaign. Why are they complaining and sending out e-mails instead of just coming on the show?

Rosenberg, who is himself quite the partisan, tut-tutted right along with Kurtz. It all disguised that Kurtz really had nothing new to add to the insinuations and innuendo in the guilt-by-association portion of the campaign against Obama in which he’s actively engaged.

The lesson: Never duck. Never complain. Answer the bell no matter what time it is.