Here's how Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz describes the Richard Blumenthal controversy:

By the way, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is down to a 3-point lead over former wrestling executive Linda McMahon after that Times story forced him to admit he never served in Vietnam.

Uh .. no. That isn't what happened at all. Blumenthal has long “admitted” he never served in Vietnam. The Times story “forced him to admit” he may have, on a few occasions, misstated his military service. Kurtz's formulation falsely suggests Blumenthal had never previously acknowledged that he wasn't in Vietnam. That's complete and total nonsense, as anyone who had paid the slightest attention to the story would know. Even the ridiculously over-written New York Times article that kicked off the controversy made clear that Blumenthal has previously said explicitly that he did not serve in Vietnam:

In a Senate debate in March, he responded to a question about Iran and the use of military force by saying, “Although I did not serve in Vietnam, I have seen firsthand the effects of military action, and no one wants it to be the first resort, nor do we want to mortgage the country's future with a deficit that is ballooning out of control.”

Keep in mind: This isn't Howard Kurtz stumbling over a particularly tricky element of a complex story on which he has done a great deal of excellent reporting. This is Kurtz getting a central fact wrong in the midst of attempting to simply summarize someone else's reporting.

For someone whose job is ostensibly to critique the work of other journalists, Kurtz sure makes a lot of glaring errors of his own.