Say you’re a big-time media critic, like Howard Kurtz. It’s time to do a little media analysis on that newfangled Twitter. Your angle:

[T]he site is less important than the way its users are changing the media culture. They are exchanging more than just 140-character bursts of blather about their daily lives: They are guiding their friends and followers to the latest news, information, gossip, snark and a pulsating, real-time debate.

If only you had an up-to-the-minute example of how that phenomenon you’ve identified manifests itself!

Kurtz, who works for the Washington Post, started to work the phones. He got one:

When I mentioned on my Twitter page that I would be talking on the air about Conan O’Brien taking over “The Tonight Show,” I got a flood of messages.

Well, ok, that didn’t require any phone work, or even looking past one’s belly button. Still, every reporter knows that one anecdote does not make a story. Kurtz went deeper, all the way down to … the celebrity angle:

[T]he boldfaced names may provide carefully calibrated glimpses, but some actively engage with their fan base.

I became friendly with Mariel Hemingway when the actress began following me on Twitter. When I began checking out her page, I was struck by how often she shared the details of her life, from her hiking to her bedtime. Without any handlers or publicists, we agreed to meet for a CNN interview when I was in Los Angeles.

Turns out Hemingway was promoting a cookbook! How surprising she would agree to meet with … a journalist.

And how fortunate that she is about the most glamorous cookbook author one can think of. One suspects that if Kurtz had noticed Dick Van Patten was following him on Twitter that they might not have “become friendly,” which I bet is a euphemism for “I sent the attractive actress a private Twitter message.”

Anyway, the point of all this that, while Kurtz was flirting with Mariel Hemingway and marveling that normal people would tweet about someone in the news, there was a very real example of how Twitter users are interacting with the media.

Here’s a story in todays’ NYT, about how CNN unaccountably blew off strong coverage of the chaotic aftermath of Iran’s election:

Untold thousands used the label “CNNfail” on Twitter to vent their frustrations. Steve LaBate, an Atlanta resident, said on Twitter, “Why aren’t you covering this with everything you’ve got?” About the same time, CNN was showing a repeat of Larry King’s interview of the stars of the “American Chopper” show. For a time, new criticisms were being added on Twitter at least once a second.

In other words, while the Post’s media critic was writing a dizzily focused, celebrity-dripping recitation of the obvious, the Times was doing an actual story  with a real-world impact stemming from the same subject.

The difference? Kurtz, of course, works for CNN.

In his Washingtonpost.com chat this morning, with typical intellectual dishonesty he addresses a question on the issue from a visitor:

Howard Kurtz: The role of bloggers and tweeters in covering the unfolding Iran saga has been invaluable. And with Ahmadinejad’s regime starting to crack down on the likes of the BBC, it’s been a difficult story to cover.
I know Twitter folks have been all over CNN for not providing more coverage on Saturday. I’m sure CNN could have done more, rather than run some taped programming, perhaps by taking the CNN International feed in the U.S. But it seemed to me that CNN did more than the other cable networks, with regular reports by Christiane Amanpour from Tehran, and especially on Sunday, when it ran many hours of live coverage.

Note how he tries to position himself as being in the know .. and then spins for the network that employs him … without revealing the confllict of interest.

A lot of people don’t like Kurtz; what bugs me about him, and to my mind makes him unfit to hold the positions he holds, is that intellectual dishonesty.

To me, an honest media critic would a) first have bent over backward to include the issues in his piece, and b) in any case bent over backward to address the issue later. (”I wish I’d been alert enough to have noticed the Twitter complaints about CNN while I was doing my in-retrospect-pretty-superficial Twitter piece in this morning’s paper. I don’t agree with most of what was said about CNN—which, remember, writes me a paycheck every week—but it was a trenchant example of the thesis of my piece.”)

And later in the chat Kurtz spins for CNN again:

But when there’s an extraordinary event, such as what is happening in Iran, they need to step it up. As I said, CNN had a lot of coverage on Sunday but not as much as people were demanding, which is why they turn to blogs and Twitter, where some folks are always posting, around the clock.

Link via kausfiles. By the way, Hitsville is on Twitter, too.