Media critic Howard Kurtz interviewed reporter/author Mark Feldstein this morning on CNN’s “Reliable Sources, who is promoting his book, Poisoning the Press, an insider’s account of how famed Washington, D.C. muckraker Jack Anderson bent, broke, or entirely ignored basic principles of ethics and decency in his quest to fill his column with damaging information about President Richard Nixon and his allies.

There were two moments in the interview that stand as persuasive evidence against anyone who maintains, against mountains of evidence to the contrary, that American journalism is fair, responsible, unbiased and ethical.

One was at the start of the interview, when Kurtz characterized Feldstein’s book as showing that Anderson was as willing to cut ethical corners as Nixon was. “Well, Nixon’s were felonies, and Anderson’s were misdemeanors,” Feldstein corrected him. “Nixon’s felonies killed thousands of people.”

What? Exactly what “felonies” was Feldstein referring to? “Watergate” was about Nixon’s conspiring to obstruct justice, not kill people. Yet Kurtz just moved on, and allowed this highly debatable, if not outright fanciful, statement of “fact” hang in the air. Kurtz, as a reporter and journalist, had an iron-clad obligation to challenge Feldstein,  and force him to clarify his statement and back it up with facts. If a guest had casually announced that Bill Clinton was a rapist or that Barack Obama was a Muslim, I doubt that Kurtz would have let the moment slide. A journalist states as fact, not opinion, that a President of the United States was a murderer, and Howard Kurtz, supposedly a reporter— whose specialty is journalistic ethics!!!—shrugs and moves on.

Disgraceful. Inexcusable.

Typical.

Then, at the end of the interview, in which Feldstein revealed that his old boss Anderson tried to destroy careers by “outing” gays whose politics he didn’t like (whether they were in fact gay or not); worked with Nixon to illegally acquire and publish the tax returns of Nixon opponent George Wallace; paid for leaks and information and generally broke any ethical principle, journalistic or otherwise, that got in the way of a good column, Kurtz asked if he was disillusioned what he discovered about Anderson’s methods.

And Feldstein replied that since Anderson exposed a lot of government wrongdoing to the public, what he did was, on balance, in the public’s interest and therefore admirable. In other words, for journalists, the ends justify the means…and they get to decide which ends are worth cheating for.

Again, Kurtz, who also once worked for Anderson, said nothing.

Please pay attention, for this is a rare moment of candor from two mainstream journalists. These people, supposedly charged with giving us the objective truth about the world we live in, really do believe that once they decide who is right and who is wrong, they are empowered to do whatever they think is necessary to see that “right”, as they define it, prevails. Jack Anderson would be proud.

We should be nervous, suspicious, and afraid. We cannot trust journalists who think this way.

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Note: From a recent book review of Poisoning the Press:

“However we may want to clothespin our noses while reading of Anderson’s Dumpster-diving tactics, it must be said that the end he sought, bringing a sometimes-criminal regime to heel, justified almost any means he could devise.”

Reviewer Chris Tucker is an Ethics Dunce, but he is far from alone.