You may be getting sick of the Schiavo memo, but Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz is still spinning the story.

In today’s column, Kurtz cites the memo controversy after pointing out that a growing number of bloggers are engaging in unfair “personal attacks” on MSM reporters and commentators. Like Slate’s Jack Shafer, washingtonpost.com’s Terry Neal, and many liberal bloggers, Kurtz portrays this as a black-and-white case in which Post reporter Mike Allen got the story right and the conservative bloggers criticizing Allen got it wrong. He also falsely claims that some conservative bloggers did not back off from questions about the authenticity of the memo even after an aide to Sen. Mel Martinez admitted he wrote it:

When controversy erupted last month over what ABC’s Douglass and The Post’s Mike Allen described as a strategy memo given to Republican senators in the Terri Schiavo case, some conservative bloggers denounced the document as questionable, even fake. Not all backed off after GOP Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida admitted an aide had written the talking points.

Kurtz, Shafer, and Neal now focus exclusively on the authenticity of the memo rather than broader questions raised by bloggers about the accuracy of Allen’s reporting. By contrast, the Post’s ombudsman has admitted that the Post has not yet substantiated Allen’s still-unretracted allegation that the memo was “distributed to Republican senators by party leaders.”

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