Gordon Trowbridge of The Detroit News’ Washington bureau brought these two maddening passages from a Howard Kurtz web chat at washingtonpost.com on Monday to the attention of the NICAR mailing list:

Louisville, Colo.: Hi Howard, Amid the calls for increasing taxes after the Minnesota bridge collapse, the media has done almost no presentation of what is actually being spent on infrastructure maintenance and new construction. Is this because it’s difficult to research or because editors don’t believe that readers are interested in actual numbers? In general, there is a lot of reporting about new legislation, but very little reporting about how effectively governments actually spend money.

Howard Kurtz: I couldn’t agree more with your last point. I do think in the wake of the Minneapolis collapse that there has been a lot of reporting on how many bridges are deemed structurally deficient and how much money is spent on maintenance, especially in local newspapers and on local stations. But where were these stories before? A few outlets did a good job, but journalists, like politicians, prefer to focus on things that are new: A new project, a new program, a new plan. Maintenance of infrastructure is considered boring — until a bridge collapses and people die. You see the same pattern with other federal agencies: How many pieces were written about the dysfunction at FEMA before Katrina?

OMGWTFBBQ? Seriously? As Trowbridge pointed out in an e-mail he sent to Kurtz, news organizations of all sizes and mediums across the country have done projects on the state of bridges in recent years, so much so that “the bad-bridge story is, at this point, a staple of computer-assisted and investigative reporting.” Word.

And what’s this flapdoodle about the supposed lack of pre-Katrina stories on FEMA incompetence? The Sun-Sentinel started riding FEMA nearly a full year before Katrina, coverage that was admittedly easy for a full-time media reporter to overlook, what with it being a 2006 Pulitzer finalist for investigative reporting and all. (Speaking of which, did you hear the one about how FEMA is going to spend $1.1 million of your money to tell disaster aid recipients that the agency is finally obeying the law and releasing their addresses to the media? Still doing a heck of a job!)

Then there’s this one:

Dallas: Why so few stories on bridge repair before the accident? Reporters would rather write, and ask questions, about haircuts. …

Howard Kurtz: Apparently the big news in Minnesota was a major appropriation for a new Twins stadium. Now we learn there are about 150,000 bridges across the country that are rated as “structurally deficient.” Would have been a good story for someone. Actually, I’m sure we’ll learn that a handful of journalists did point this out, but it hardly received widespread media attention.

Wait, is he accepting the premise that every single reporter in United States really would prefer writing about haircuts instead of the basic news that the 99 percent of journalists who have never written even a single word about the physical attributes of a presidential candidate cover every day? Yes, a “handful” of journalists did point this out, as anyone surely would learn by spending 30 seconds in Nexis. More importantly, what gets better results in your town? “Widespread media attention” focused on a vast, meaningless nationwide bridge statistic? Or a report from the local newspaper or TV station on the three most dangerous bridges in your county?

Attention Howard Kurtz: Report to The Vast Ocean Of High-Quality Investigative And Enterprising Journalism That Occurs Outside Of The New York And Washington Media Markets immediately. You have quite a bit of catching up to do before you decide to have another poo on real, local journalists.

UPDATE: See the full rant that Trowbridge sent to Romnesko.