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02/20/2005 Archived Entry: ""

Media Watch: Buzzflash's GOP Hypocrite of the Week is...Howard Kurtz, "alleged media critic for the Washington Post, took to the Wolf Blitzer CNN show to indignantly defend the faux journalist with a pseudonym, Jeff Gannon. "

Kurtz claimed that "any journalist could get a day pass to the White House and ask the President a question." This despite the fact that a series of journalists and commentators, including Maureen Dowd in the NY Times, have gone on record as being unable to get a pass without an intensive security clearing that took months.

Meanwhile, the Slate forum takes Kurtz to task on his coverage of CNN news executive Eason Jason who resigned due to pressure from the blogosphere over a comment that American military seemed to be targeting journalists. (My personal opinion: he resigned because CNN is chicksh*t and doesn't stand behind its people, preferring to cave and dump them at the first sign of a public frown.) From Slate, First, kill all the telling details! WaPo and CNN's Howard Kurtz emails to explain why he revised his Saturday Eason Jordan piece to cut out the juiciest, most suggestive detail of the "gossip about Jordan's personal life." (See before and after...Er, it *used* to be at "after." Now you get a site down for maintenance page.)

From Kurtz For the Record

I compressed that paragraph about Eason Jordan's social life, without a word of advice from anyone, for one reason. I was trying to squeeze in several interviews I had done after the first edition into my story for later editions, and given dead-tree space limitations, was literally going line by line to save room. The first-edition story was published, but I thought it important to include more voices from the blogosphere for later editions.

From Slate a) He didn't bury the lede. He removed the lede entirely due to "space limitations"! b) I take Kurtz at his word. But nobody can speak for their subconscious (otherwise it wouldn't be subconscious). That's why there are normally prophylactic rules against massive conflicts of interest. Maybe kausfiles could launch a lucrative spinoff, kurtzfiles, devoted entirely to WaPo's media critic explaining to his readers the non-corrupt reasoning behind his seemingly pro-CNN reporting decisions. c) You don't have to get actual 'words of advice' from someone to be influenced by them--to worry about how they will react. d) "Going line by line to save room." I used to do that! As Kurtz notes, it's a print thing. You don't have to do it in cyberspace. There's plenty of room. Which raises an issue: If Kurtz is cutting highly relevant information in order to squeeze his piece into the printed, hand-delivered version of the Post, why not at least publish the complete version on the Web? Doesn't the failure to take advantage of the Web's extra space put dead tree papers in the normally-futile position of actually suppressing a superior competitor (the full Web versions of what reporters produce)?

Also for the record, but from me this time, cyberspace *does* hold columnists to a word limit. FOX holds me to approximately 850 words...not because space online is limited but because a reader's attention is.