{"id":720,"date":"2003-10-07T11:15:22","date_gmt":"2003-10-07T16:15:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/720.html"},"modified":"2003-10-07T11:15:22","modified_gmt":"2003-10-07T16:15:22","slug":"another-howard-kurtz-conflict-of-interest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/another-howard-kurtz-conflict-of-interest\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Howard Kurtz conflict of interest"},"content":{"rendered":"

I admit to harboring a love-hate approach to the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz<\/a>. On the one hand, he’s a conservative partisan pretending to be an objective journalist. On the other hand, he usually does a pretty good job as a reporter covering the “media analysis” beat.<\/p>\n

I’ve noticed over the last couple of years that his partisan bias has been seeping into his work with increasing frequency, which has become pretty annoying. But I keep reading his columns because, frankly, his coverage of the national press is better than any of the other papers’ media critics.<\/p>\n

Last week, my opinion of Kurtz’s professionalism went from bad to worse when he failed to tell readers an important detail about his personal perspective.<\/p>\n

Like every other political reporter in the country, Kurtz has been paying close attention to the California recall race, with plenty of attention on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign.<\/p>\n

In fact, in his daily “Media Notes” column<\/a>, Kurtz mentioned Schwarzenegger five times in five columns last week. Kurtz’s work commented on the Schwarzenegger campaign’s response to the groping allegations, the alleged praise for Hitler, the endorsements from California newspapers, etc.<\/p>\n

All the while, Kurtz was offering analysis on the quality of the Schwarzenegger message. What Kurtz failed to mention is that his wife, Sheri Annis, has been Schwarzenegger’s press secretary<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In other words, Kurtz is hardly a disinterested media critic, objectively considering a candidate’s media strategy and communications efforts. Kurtz is critiquing the very message that his wife has been shaping<\/a>, making this a fairly obvious conflict of interest. Either the Post should have asked a different writer to cover these issues, or, at a minimum, Kurtz should have informed readers of his personal ties to the campaign.
\n
\nWhat are we to think about Kurtz’s consistent support of Schwarzenegger’s campaign? Was it just a coincidence that Kurtz was supportive of the campaign’s media strategy in dealing with recent controversies?<\/p>\n

Last week, for example, Kurtz was dismissive about the sexual misconduct story<\/a>, parroting Schwarzenegger’s talking points, saying that “voters will probably see this as a late hit, six days before the recall,” and concluding that the allegations are an old story “discounted by much of the electorate.” Kurtz even mocked the story, saying, “[A] Hollywood star grabbing at actresses and crew members — shocking!”<\/p>\n

Actually, for a lot of us, the fact that a gubernatorial candidate has repeatedly made unwanted sexual advances on women, groping and grabbing women’s bodies without their consent, is<\/i> shocking and hardly the kind of behavior that should be mocked by professional journalists.<\/p>\n

In fact, last Wednesday, Kurtz lambasted<\/a> the Toronto Globe & Mail newspaper for publishing “the most tilted stories I’ve ever seen in a major newspaper” about the Schwarzenegger campaign. Kurtz concluded that he’s scared about the drop in “journalistic standards.”<\/p>\n

Isn’t it ironic that a man with such obvious conflicts of interest would be lecturing others about journalistic standards?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I admit to harboring a love-hate approach to the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz. On the one hand, he’s a conservative partisan pretending to be an objective journalist. On the other hand, he usually does a pretty good job as a reporter covering the “media analysis” beat. I’ve noticed over the last couple of years that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}