The dual problems that bedevil Howard Kurtz were on perfect display on this morning’s Reliable Sources. Kurtz’s first vulnerability is conflict of interest. He works for the Washington Post and CNN; that calls into question anything he reports about the Post or its national competitors, and CNN and its competitors.

(In other words, he’s pretty reliable, except when he’s discussing the Post or the NYT or the Wall Street Journal or USA Today or CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, or MSNBC.)

The second problem, which seems to be caused by the first but also has the feel of being part of his journalistic approach in any case, is a talent for bland mooting, as the British say, of journalistic problems but never addressing head on their obvious implications. In this way, he is the ostrich of media reporting.

Case in point is today’s show, which was playing off Wall St.’s near-meltdown this week. (Transcript available here.) His guests are Ali Velshi, billed as a “senior CNN business correspondent,”  and Steven Pearlstein, a Post biz columnist. Note that both are colleagues of Kurtz’s.

My impression is that the NYT and the WSJ have been fairly aggressive in their coverage of the run-up to this little disaster, going back to the predatory loan scandals earlier this decade and continuing through the risks of the complex financial instruments whose elusive values nearly brought our financial system to a halt last week. If you’re doing a show about who got the story right and who didn’t, wouldn’t you bend over backward to acknowledge those who did? Kurtz gave his newsroom buddy Pearlstein lots of time to pat himself on the back for his work on the issue, and he probably deserves it, but the Post’s biz section can’t compete with the Times’ or the WSJ’s. If the latter two operations didn’t cover the run-up well, Kurtz should have said so. If they did, he should have acknowledged it.

Kurtz didn’t do either because he’s not in the business of actual media reporting. He’s in the business of media non-reporting.

In the course of this journey, he’s developed the facility of acting like he’s saying something but never managing to bring it down to reality. Here he is questioning Velshi:

 KURTZ: But where are the stories saying that the government didn’t build the levees [i.e., to protect against the metaphorical financial hurricane] high enough? This didn’t have to happen. It was a failure, to some extent, of federal regulation.

VELSHI: Yes. And those stories are coming out now, and they’re coming a little bit too late. The fact is, this is the same discussion you and I had several months ago about where were people warning about the mortgage crisis. This is just an extension of all of that.

We — there were some people covering them, but they weren’t breaking news.
[…]
Thematic evolutions of stories don’t seem to make it onto TV as easily as they do into some kind of journals, and that’s part of the problem.

Most reporters who have a key representative of an institution central to their beat on the hook would take this opportunity to ask the obvious question. Say: “Ali, why didn’t CNN’s business desk get on this story early? Says here you’re a ’senior business correspondent.’ Did you lack the expertise or the resources or were you guys just asleep at the switch?” *

But Kurtz didn’t, again because he was questioning a representative of a company he worked for. And couldn’t he have at least brought up the other obvious question: How has the nation’s premiere business channel, CNBC, taken on this issue over the last few years? Here again, you get the feeling he didn’t want to address the equally obvious answer: A lot better than the CNN business desk did.

* Free bonus followup question: “In retrospect, Ali, as we sit amid a financial disaster your own network calls the worst since the Depression, did you serve your audience well over the years leading up to this precipice?”