The New York Times is at it again. The Cable Gamer woke up this morning to see that Jacques Steinberg had found
new way to attack media-beat rival Howard Kurtz. The accusation from the Times is that there's an "ethical question" concerning Kurtz. Here's Steinberg's lede:
When Howard Kurtz invited Kimberly Dozier, the CBS journalist wounded in Iraq, onto his program, “Reliable Sources,” on CNN on Sunday, he was not a disinterested interviewer. Mr. Kurtz’s wife, Sheri Annis, had been paid to serve as a publicist for Ms. Dozier’s memoir, “Breathing the Fire,” which Ms. Dozier had come on the program to discuss.
Let's get a grip here, folks. Dozier, a nationally prominent journalist, gets blown up in Iraq, with cameras rolling. She is severely wounded in that attack, and two of her CBS colleagues killed. Then she writes a book about her ordeal. How could that not be news? And why shouldn't Kurtz cover it on his CNN media program, "Reliable Sources"?
And it's all the more benign, since, as the Times concedes, Kurtz disclosed his wife's role as a publicist for the book on the air. But the critics still aren't satisfied. And so Steinberg hunts down the usual collection of nitpickers, including an "ethics and diversity fellow" at the Poynter Institute, to weigh ponderously on this matter.
At a time when the media are under siege for relentless liberal bias--see any edition of Newsbusters for a dozen examples every day, including CNN's John Roberts just last night--one has to wonder why the media get hung up on such topics as an "ethical question" that is a) fully answered, and b) not a question.
Maybe Steinberg and all his little liberal henchpersons--his story got a big boost from the Slate.com "Today's Papers" column this morning--are just stupid,in their robot-repetitive whining about the same old tired topics. Or maybe they're smart, but mean--because maybe they are just jealous of Kurtz, who is still a working journo, long after so many other reporters have been reduced to the status of "ethics and diversity fellows" at dopey media think tanks.
