For anyone who was wondering where Howard Kurtz is going to land next week after he leaves CNN's Reliable Sources, here you go. Starting next week, Kurtz will no longer be hosting the second worst show that proclaims to be a "media watchdog" show, but the absolute worst, Fox News Watch.
Color me jaded, but I don't have any hopes that Kurtz hosting this mess will make it one iota better than what we've seen regularly from the current host, Jon Scott. This week's show was a typical example of what the viewers are treated to every Saturday on Fox and their second segment this week discussing the Supreme Court rulings and what they did to the Voting Rights Act was some of the worst.
Par for the course, MSNBC was trashed continually, because even though that network is far from actually being liberal, the fact that they've got a few liberal hosts puts a great big target on their back with this bunch. The panel members all attacked MSNBC's reaction to what the Supreme Court did to the Voting Rights Act, claiming that the network provided no context in their criticism that the court essentially gutted the law, when of course, the opposite is true and the context-free zone was right here.
SCOTT: It seems like the media, especially on the voting rights thing, didn't... well, didn't mention that most of the Voting Rights Act was left in tact.
GRENELL: Yeah, I mean, we have MSNBC who gave us that great legal mind, Al Sharpton immediately on the Voting Rights Act. I mean, it was just a really, besides sounding ridiculous, it really makes the left wing media and MSNBC just look like this is a partisan hack job.
Very few reporters were telling us that this was a 1965 act and that times have changed and there was really very little analysis of why we would need a 1965 fix-it law today, in 2013. That commentary was completely lost. You had Al Sharpton and others acting like blacks could no longer vote now that the Supreme Court had ruled this way. It was really ridiculous.
Yeah, how dare some black guy who has been part of the Civil Rights movement for decades chime in and pretend to know anything about this topic? No one said that all black people would be kept from voting... just the ones who they want to disenfranchise who were kept standing in line for endless hours or who will now have to jump through hoops to come up with these additional ID's. And it went downhill from there with the others chiming in as well.
Mediaite decided to cover this story since their resident hack, Joe Concha was a member of the panel, and surprise, surprise, they didn't give it an ounce of context as well. The post pretty well reads like one by someone who was forced to write about it because one of their fellow employees was on the show when they'd really rather have been doing something else.
Regardless of the allegations here that MSNBC did not give enough context to just what the Supreme Court did to gut the Voting Rights Act, they did just the opposite. They explained that striking down Section 4 and relying on this useless, obstructionist, horrid Congress of ours to fix it makes Section 5 useless as well.
They talked about the states who immediately moved to disenfranchise voters as soon as this ruling went through. They discussed just how political this Supreme Court has become and how they knew exactly what they were doing, and how this has been a dream of Chief Justice John Roberts for a long, long time now.
Regardless of what anyone thinks of the network, or Al Sharpton, when it comes to the Voting Rights Act ruling, there was plenty of context and if you need more just go read some of the posts on their site on the issue.
Civil rights leaders dealt ‘a devastating blow’
