Fox News has detected a grave injustice in the television industry: Earlier this week, News 12 New Jersey suspended staff reporter Sean Bergin for veering off, in the middle of a news broadcast about the murder of a Jersey City police officer, into a disquisition blaming violent crime on fatherless black men.
Fox News anchor Howard Kurtz has repeatedly claimed, most famously during a live interrogation on CNN, that his relationship with Fox News contributor Lauren Ashburn amounted to a “limited venture” for which the MediaBuzz host was compensated on a piecemeal “freelance basis.” Confidential documents obtained by Gawker, however, tell a dramatically different story.
BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski noted on Tuesday that The Daily Download, the obscure media-news website founded by Fox News anchor Howard Kurtz and his business partner Lauren Ashburn, has disappeared. Yet only a few months ago Ashburn was hyping the site’s traffic to contributors. “Lauren told me that at one point it had a half million views per day,” Lorraine Murphy, a Vancouver web consultant who wrote for the site between May and August of this year, told Gawker. So what happened?
Howard Kurtz is losing it. Today the quote-unquote media watchdog published 527 words on FoxNews.com about the Hamptons photo shoot of Ben Bradlee’s daughter-in-law, Pari Bradlee, who apparently teaches yoga to Washington A-listers like Howard Kurtz. It’s not that Pari Bradlee’s precise arrangement of undergarments has nothing to do with the media (though, in fact, it does not); it’s that it has nothing to do with anything. It has no point; it has no angle; it has no news. There is nothing there. Except some boobies. Which, to be fair, is probably all Howard Kurtz is really interested in right now.
Here's a story. In 2004, I was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, covering television. In January of that year, I began looking into a story about political donations made by reporters, editors, anchors, executives and other employees at media companies.
The Daily Beast stage, or fraction, of the career of Howie Kurtz ended with a perfectly apt string of Twitter messages from the media reporter/Washington bureau chief:
How does multi-platform conflict-machine Howard Kurtz crank out so much coverage, people wonder? Maybe it's easier to write a lot of media criticism if you don't read the media you're criticizing. So today Kurtz finds—for two different outlets—a dark shadow in the sunny coverage of NBA player Jason Collins' decision to come out as gay: Collins was at one point engaged to a woman.
Some tough words from Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) about President Obama and his team's communications strategy was raising eyebrows in Washington Monday morning, but that was before Pelosi disavowed the quote and Newsweek's Daily Beast admitted a mistake and retracted it.
Fox News' favorite media reporter, NewsBeast's Howie Kurtz, has a new piece out about how Roger Ailes has gone soft, "repositioning" Fox News to be less overtly racist and "pull[ing] back a bit on the throttle" of inchoate conspiratorial rage directed against Obama. Kurtz's source for this objectively verifiable fact is Fox chief Roger Ailes, so you know it's true.
Restaurants in New York City have been tweeting their Sunday brunch offerings, not their structural damages reports. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is declaring "the worst" to be over. A few city streets were flooded, but it wasn't that bad, and the vast majority of people who live along Irene's blustery path up and down the East Coast have survived. How can this be?
In your hijacked Friday media column: Tina Brown has breasts and used to do it, sexually speaking, to Martin Amis; the Washington Post Co. falls from the profit curve; Robin Roberts may or may not be too tall for morning television, and Howard Kurtz once again acquits himself with the dignity and effortless charisma we've come to expect from him.
