If anyone is paying attention, you know that I have no love for Howard Kurtz. All in all, he tends to frame things in a conservative light. Sometimes I believe it’s unintentional; others I don’t. But I do read him because I think he at least makes an effort to be fair in his role as Media Critic.

Today’s column, which I’m going to quote extensively, is one of those time I believe he is 100% correct in his observations of the Imus media feeding frenzy (nothing sets the sharks off more than when the blood in the water if from one of their own) vis-à-vis the Duke lacrosse player’s rape by the media.

Everyone, including Don Imus, agrees that the remarkable women of the Rutgers basketball team were unfairly maligned by his racial slur.

But what about the living hell visited on three young men from the Duke lacrosse team? In all the coverage of the sexual assault charges that were finally dropped last week, very few have talked about how the media slimed them.

That miscarriage of justice was aided, abetted and amplified by a media that unfairly turned the men into a national symbol of pampered, out-of-control student-athletes. Prosecutor Mike Nifong might lose his law license over the botched case, but the media never get disbarred.

Imus repeatedly apologized for calling the Rutgers women “nappy-headed hos,” and a national uproar prompted CBS Radio and NBC News to pull the plug on his program. But where is the apology to David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann from news organizations that launched a classic feeding frenzy based on one woman’s shaky allegations? Even Nifong has said he is sorry.

The combination of race, crime, sports and a blue-chip university proved irresistible for a business that thrives on creating national soap operas. Did the indictments, as the team’s lacrosse season was canceled, have to be covered? Of course. But media outlets framed the story as one of privilege vs. poverty, black vs. white, athletes above the law — if, of course, it happened.

Television showed the homes of the players’ parents. Newsweek put two of the defendants’ mug shots on the cover. Sometimes the word “alleged” was dropped in the process. “I’m so glad they didn’t miss a lacrosse game over a little thing like gang rape,” Headline News host Nancy Grace said.

Jon Stewart’s crew rightfully ripped Nancy Graceless for her less-than-balanced coverage of the Duke trial. She’s a fucking disgrace and her handling of that story should get HER fired. With her salary, nothing short of paying for those kid’s full college educations will make up for the mud she regularly ran them through. Anyway…

Once discrepancies surfaced in the accuser’s account, some local and national outlets did a good job of bird-dogging the case. But by then the presumption of innocence had virtually vanished.

The accuser got to make her charges from behind a curtain of anonymity, which is entirely proper in sexual assault cases. But I’m not so sure the media should continue to shield her now that investigators have determined her to be a liar. The New York Post, Washington Times, and Raleigh News & Observer have all identified the woman.

Yeah. Her name is Crystal Gail Mangum and she needs the Anna Nicole treatment. Stat. If the media is allowed to forever alter the lives of students from Duke who did something immature and stupid because of the accusations from a stripper who cried rape, then the media should be obliged to do the same to the accuser who turned out to be a bald-faced liar.

We can argue about whether he should have been given another chance — Mel Gibson is still making movies, isn’t he? — but Imus was probably doomed when the national debate morphed into an argument over indecency and meanness in broadcasting. He became the symbol of all that was wrong with today’s toxic popular culture.

But what about the radio hosts who demean others out of anger or ideology, not misguided humor? Michael Savage was also fired by MSNBC after telling a gay caller that he should “get AIDS and die,” but he is now on 370 radio stations. He once called the Million Mom March for gun control the “million dyke march.” On his Web site, under “Savage Rap Lyrics,” is a song that begins, “If she’s got 10 toes, she’s a ho.”

And that slang word for whore comes, of course, from the thriving rap industry. “Imus should only be fired when the black artists who make millions of dollars rapping about black bitches and hos lose their recording contracts,” civil rights lawyer Constance Rice wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “Black leaders should denounce Imus and boycott him and call for his head only after they do the same for the misogynist artists with whom they have shared stages, magazine covers and awards shows.”

It would be a welcome development if the national uproar over Imus turned into a sustained examination of others who pollute the airwaves. But the media’s attention span is such that they will soon be chasing some new scandal, dropping the decency crusade as quickly as they abandoned the Duke case once the racial story line they had pushed collapsed under the weight of the facts.

…said the pot to the kettle. But overall he’s got a valid point. My call to have Mangum be put forth as a modern-day Hester Prynne not withstanding, the media needs to put on the brakes a bit and figure out what really qualifies as journalism and what they’re publishing now which is nothing short of National Inquirer-quality commercialized fish wrap. As much as it made ThinkProgress happy to publish the findings of the Pew Research Group that Daily Show/Colbert Report viewers are more knowledgeable than Fox News viewers on the major issues of the day, I think even Jon would agree that his viewer’s average of 44% who recognized Scooter Libby is a bit depressing; the national average of 29% is enough to make you want to live in the mountains cut off from society altogether.