Howard Kurtz is the press reporter and the press critic for the Washington Post and CNN. Having dual roles on dual outlets creates a web of conflicts of interest that make his job essentially pointless. He will always tackle the surface issue and avoid the deeper, more important one; he belabors the obvious and overlooks the subtle. You always get the sense he’ll skate past the hard stuff rather than address it, as someone in his position should.

Case in point: Check out his story late last week on the Katie Couric hullabaloo. The Wall Street Journal posted a story Wednesday afternoon with a good clean scoop: saying that Couric’s future in the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News was in doubt, and that she might be out as soon as early next year, after the new president is inaugurated in January.  Kurtz then had to scramble to get similar “news” into the pages of the Post for the next morning. Seven grafs into a thirteen graf story, he acknowledged that the Journal had it first.

Why didn’t Kurtz write his story this way?

“I’m the press critic here at the Washington Post, and the press reporter as well. So I’d like to take this moment to give you some news, and also reveal the workings of the newspaper biz.

The WSJ scooped my ass yesterday; they posted online a story about how people inside CBS were beginning to visualize a future without Katie Couric. It’s not that big of a deal—Couric’s ratings are an embarrassment, and the company has to do something one of these days, before the CBS Evening News starts getting beaten by “Saved by the Bell” reruns.

But, instead of doing a little adventuresome reporting about what any peabrain could see was going to happen, your humble narrator contented himself with an innocuous feature on Couric less than a week ago. It was a good example of what is occasionally referred to in newsrooms, in somewhat vulgar terms, as a “blowjob piece.” I asked her softball questions, she got to spin her position till the cows came home, and I didn’t add any uncomfortable follow-up questions or interview any outside parties.

It looks pretty lame right now, but the idea is you suck up to players like her in the hopes of maybe getting a tidbit of a scoop later on down the line.

Unfortunately, the Journal caught me with my pants down; just a couple of days after my no-news spectacular, they posed their story, and managed to ruin the rest of my Wednesday, as I scrambled to play catch up and basically regurgitate the news for your folks in you next morning’s Post.

If that hadn’t happened, I was just going to spent yesterday compiling old stuff I’d written into my next book, but in theory I could have spent it trying to scoop the Journal on some other story. Instead, as I said, I played catch-up, rewriting the WSJ, crediting them far enough down in the story so most folks wouldn’t notice, and not mentioning at all my intrepid exclusive interview with Couric just a few days previous.

And that, my friends, is a glimpse into how a modern press reporter operates.”