The Cable Gamer has never minded that Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post media-beat writer, is also the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources" media show. Until now.
Now it's become obvious that Kurtz is willing to use his platform in the Post to advance the interests of CNN.
In this morning's paper, Kurtz has a "news" story headlined, "The Beck Factor at Fox: Staffers say comments taint their work." That's Glenn Beck, of course, and Kurtz has managed to write an entire story alleging that Fox journalists don't like Beck because he is so opinionated. And so which Fox journalists are those? Kurtz doesn't name one.
Not one. A whole huge 1000+ words on Beck, in which Kurtz alleges that Beck "has often seemed to overshadow the rest of Fox News," (Ha!) and yet Kurtz doesn't have a single named source. And for all I know, not a single source, period, except his own imagination, plus perhaps a p.r. strategist for CNN.
Kurtz certainly does his best to suggest that all of Foxland is an uproar: "Beck has become a constant topic of conversation among Fox journalists, some of whom say they believe he uses distorted or inflammatory rhetoric that undermines their credibility." But again, he doesn't name a single disgruntled Fox journalist or anyone else at Fox.
Kurtz does include this telling graf:
Fox staffers note that veteran producer Gresham Striegel left the network after clashing with Beck and say the host has surrounded himself with loyalists from Mercury [Beck's production company], some of whom remain on that company's payroll. (Striegel did not respond to a request for comment.)
Kurtz doesn't exactly spell it out, but Striegel now works for MSNBC. So Striegel could be the source for some of Kurtz's accusations--or maybe that's just a bit of misdirection: Kurtz just wants us to think that Striegel was a source, somehow, as a way of throwing suspicion off of CNN, which is the obvious beneficiary of Kurtz's grenade-lobbing.
Further throwing bombs at CNN's corporate rivals, Kurtz adds, "Friction between opinionated cable personalities and journalists has also flared occasionally at MSNBC." But those MSNBC feuds are visible and on-air. Everyone knows that Keith Olbermann has feuded, big time, live on TV, with Chris Matthews, and everyone also knows about his fight with Dan Abrams, because that's been public.
But relying only on anonymous "sources," Kurtz tells readers this morning, "Beck has caused such anguish at Fox that some of its journalists celebrated the failure of last week's interview with embattled ex-congressman Eric Massa, which Beck pronounced a waste of time."
Let's get this straight: Kurtz works for CNN. CNN is a blood rival to Fox (even if Jon Klein tries to pretend otherwise) and has been for 14 years, since Fox upstarted in 1996. And CNN is also, of course, a rival to MSNBC. And for his part, Kurtz has been at CNN for as long as The Cable Gamer can remember--and TCG is older than she looks. Interestingly, Kurtz doesn't use any sort of disclaimer about CNN in the body of his piece--only a little tiny disclaimer in the byline.
So while the Kurtz narrative is that Fox suffers internal strife because Beck is such a loudmouth, here's a better explanatory narrative: CNN is in trouble, and so Kurtz, loyal to his TV employer and its needs, uses his Post platform to bomb CNN's rivals: Fox, and to a lesser extent, MSNBC.
I wonder what The Washington Post's ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, thinks about his paper being used as a special-interest weapon in The Cable Game.
But here's a prediction: It's not going to work. Not for Kurtz, and not for his masters at CNN. Fox has proven that it can do damage control on Beck when it has to--Fox distanced itself from Beck's over-the-top comment last year that Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture," and Beck himself has apologized as well. Everybody slips up; the issue is recovery, and not making the same mistake twice.
The reality is that Fox is like a newspaper--there's the news section, and there's the opinion section. Beck is in the opinion section. He has opinions.
Kurtz has opinions, too, although he hides them in the news section. And he also seems to have a corporate agenda, on behalf of CNN. And that's what the Post should be investigating.
