Well, it’s nice to see Howard Kurtz leaping to my defense:
Ames, Iowa: Jake Tapper was the subject of an adoring article in the National Review (by Mark Hemingway) last week. Prior to that, he was in a tiff with liberal blogger Josh Marshall wherein he banned Marshall from following Tapper’s Twitter feed.
At what point does one start to question Tapper’s objectivity?
Howard Kurtz: That doesn’t make sense. A National Review writer says Tapper is fair, and that automatically makes him unfair? (The Twitter ban lasted a few hours and didn’t involve Marshall himself.) Or should we conclude that Tapper is biased to the left because he spent several years at Salon? How about we judge him by his work? I profiled him a few weeks ago and noted that he was tough on Obama during the campaign, but was also tough on Bush during the 2000 campaign.
I wrote what I thought was a reasonably straightforward profile of Jake Tapper where, among other things, I observed that he formerly worked in a Democratic congressional office, at Handgun Control Inc., and criticized the media for going too easy on Bush in 2000. But apparently because I didn’t kneecap the guy for being liberal and instead observed that ABC News’s White House correspondent is necessarily tough on the current president, that somehow consitutes “adoring.” Kurtz’s response is right on target here, especially his observation about judging him by his work. Those corners of the internet taking issue with Tapper or his agreeing to be profiled by NRO seem all too comfortable sneering that he’s compromised, when they should be addressing any substantive issues they have with Tapper’s reporting. Otherwise, it looks like it’s their adoration for the president that’s the real problem.