Howard Kurtz Ain't Scared of the I-Man's Tongue

Washington Post Media Critic Howard Kurtz talked to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on CNN’s Reliable Sources yesterday, and told Imus Gibbs was most engaged when talking about how he recently joined Twitter.

“He went on and on and on, and after that interview I checked his Twitter and he was writing about going kayaking on the Potomac River,” said Kurtz, who also learned that Gibbs had made an interesting offer to the White House Press Association: if they stop using sources off the record, the administration would stop having background briefings.

“That went nowhere,” said Kurtz. “And the truth is, it’d be impossible to enforce.”

Unlike some of his predecessors, Gibbs has the advantage of being part of President Obama’s tight inner circle. “He goes to a lot of the high level, sensitive meetings,” said Kurtz. “So he goes speak with some authority.”

That doesn’t mean he’s not an expert dodger. “Every press secretary comes up with a way to dodge or finesse questions he or she doesn’t like,” Kurtz pointed out. “Gibbs does it sometimes with humor, and sometimes with answers that are so long that everyone in the briefing room nods off and you forget what the question was.”

Kurtz did some dodging of his own this morning, denying there was “a fallout,” as Imus put it, between Sally Quinn and the Washington Post, which recently took away her column.

“This was a temporary column that she had for the holiday season last year about entertaining,” said Kurtz, adding that Quinn’s main job is running the Post’s On Faith website. “It’s not like they sent her into the dungeon and threw away the key.”

Which is what Imus wanted to do Kurtz, but his tongue was too swollen to bother, and so he moved on, asking Kurtz about a recent incident between CBS and the White House.

Last week, CBSNews.com posted a link to a conservative blog that claimed potential Supreme Court nominee and current Solicitor General Elena Kagan was a lesbian, which administration officials roundly denied.

“The White House went nuts, and people talked to me on the record about how irresponsible this was for CBS to put it on their website,” said Kurtz. CBS dug in its heels for a few days, but ultimately realized the claim was a rumor and yanked the story.

The media as a whole has been similarly slow to recognize the importance of the Tea Party movement, and Kurtz thinks it is still a difficult thing to understand because it operates outside the usual political parameters.

“This is not a tightly organized political party—it’s a movement,” he said. “It tracks all different kinds of people.”

Recent polling shows that Tea Partiers tend to be white, conservative Republicans who are strongly anti-tax and anti-government. They are better educated than most Americans, but Kurtz neglected to mention that last fact, and so Imus attacked him for being unfair.

“That swollen tongue of yours seems to have gone down a bit,” Kurtz observed. “It seems a little sharper.”

More than anything, the Tea Party people are mad, Kurtz added. “And that’s fine. That’s part of the American tradition.”

It’s certainly part of the tradition on this show.

-Julie Kanfer