Permit me to start with an unsurprising complaint: Howard Kurtz almost never notices any research the Media Research Center does. Shocking, I know. (Last Monday, he publicized the latest Media Matters attack on a Boston Globe technology writer, Hiawatha Bray, after about six stories on the Media Matters-induced kerfuffle of “Gannongate.”) Today he publicizes a study by the “Project for Excellence in Journalism,” run by former Los Angeles Times media reporter Tom Rosenstiel, whose results we can only sum up as utterly unserious.

The story’s big picture: in covering the Iraq war last year, 73 percent of the stories on Fox News included the opinions of the anchors and journalist reporting them, compared to 29 percent of the war reports on MSNBC and 2 percent on CNN. So Fox is 35 times more likely to spout opinions than CNN. Don’t buy it.

But here’s where it gets really silly: “Among news-oriented evening shows, journalist opinions were voiced in 70 percent of the stories on Fox’s “Special Report with Brit Hume”…9 percent on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” and 9 percent on CNN’s “Newsnight with Aaron Brown.” Anyone who’s ever watched Olbermann sneer and Aaron Brown pontificate would be shocked to consider they’re much less opinionated than Brit Hume. These numbers betray an awful lot of opinion in deciding what’s opinion. Howard Kurtz is being a stenographer today, failing to ask any skeptical questions at all. He can’t even tell us what the study periods are for these numbers. Is it the whole year? Or is itty-bitty pieces of a year, selected at random? The Post reader has no idea from the Kurtz story.