When we lasted visited Howard Kurtz, a day or two ago, he was in the pages of the Washington Post scrambling to play catch up when the WSJ scooped him on a big CBS/Katie Couric story: that she was “likely to leave the network.” Kurtz credited the Journal … eventually, but didn’t mention his own softball feature on Couric in the Post a few days before, in which everything sounded fine and dandy in Couricland.

Kurtz followed up on his Reliable Sources CNN show Sunday. A few days on, he decided it was safe to forget the Journal’s scoop. Indeed, to hear him tell it Sunday, the story was all his:

But a year and a half after her debut, sources tell me that Katie Couric is talking to her CBS bosses about giving up the anchor chair after the election. Both sides frustrated that nothing seems to be working in digging the broadcast out of its third-place hole. No final decision yet, but it’s now likely that Couric will be relinquishing the job and possibly leaving the network.

For the record, I think a press critic who doesn’t bend over backward to acknowledge a competitor like that doesn’t belong in the job, but of course Kurtz’s ethical lapses pale next to the rampant conflicts of interest he juggles holding the jobs of both press critic and press reporter at two different outlets, the Post and CNN.

Anyway, there was speculation—from CBS scold Bernard Goldberg, primarily—that Couric’s side leaked this story, but if Kurtz was mad at her helping the Journal and not him after his little Couric puff piece you couldn’t tell from the broadcast, in which he was at pains to spin the thing Couric’s way. Note above, for example, how suddenly it was Couric telling her bosses she might leave.

Then comes this nonsensical defense:

Well, let me give you my two cents. I mean, if you look at the cold, hard Nielsen numbers, yes, you would have to say that Katie Couric has failed. But drawing nearly seven million viewers a night is not failure compared to other forms of media delivery. Going to Iraq, anchoring on Super Tuesday, interviewing General Petraeus, that’s not failure either.

But of course the issue is that Couric has been losing viewers since she started. And mentioning the words “seven million viewers” and “Katie Couric” in the same sentence can only be justified if … you haven’t looked at the ratings in the last month. Couric didn’t have seven million viewers last week; she didn’t even have six million. (And again, while one hates to buy into the ageist network demographics, it’s also true that less than two million of that total are between the ages of 25 and 54, which is why it was CBS execs talking to Couric about leaving rather than vice-versa.)

Finally, while Kurtz gets on his high horse about another commentator remarking on Couric’s clothes, he himself refers to her as “Katie” in the show, a hugely unprofessional and sexist thing to do.