Charles Kaiser on Howard Kurtz's conflicting interests (and the CNN pundit's love affair with the right)

Howard Kurtz is the self-styled prince of American media reporters, a writing, blogging, book-writing machine who has covered the press for the Washington Post since 1990, and pontificated about it for CNN—as host of Reliable Sources—since 1998.

Last week was typical for Kurtz: nine articles in the Post, including a big profile of Chris Matthews, three blogs, and one online discussion, all capped off with his Sunday show on CNN. This never-ending blizzard of activity has sometimes obscured the basic fact about Kurtz's career: His dual roles as salaried press critic for the Post and salaried host on CNN put Howie at the heart of the most blatant and longest-lasting conflict of interests I know of in big-time, mainstream journalism.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, when I was the press critic for Newsweek, the rules about this sort of thing were simple: If you were a full-time staff critic of the media, you were not allowed to be paid by any of the people you were writing about. Detroit correspondents couldn't moonlight for General Motors, and I couldn't freelance for the New York Times. So, for example, the nonfiction-in-brief column I had been writing for the Times Book Review ended as soon as Newsweek hired me.

There was a time when even Kurtz realized that accepting salaried employment from another media conglomerate was inappropriate for the press reporter of the Washington Post. Back in 1998—just before he became the host of CNN's Reliable Sources—Kurtz moonlighted (once) for ABC's
Nightline, to do a profile of Matt Drudge. When veteran journalist Doug Ireland called Kurtz to challenge him about this apparent conflict—working for ABC when he also had to write about the network—Kurtz conceded it was a "legitimate question."

"In his defense," Ireland wrote, "Kurtz told me that his Nightline gig had been approved by Post managing editor Robert Kaiser and that, since it was 'not a continuing relationship' with ABC but a 'one-time assignment,' conflict of interest was 'not a problem.'"

That seems fairly reasonable (full disclosure: Robert Kaiser is also my brother), but later that same year the Post approved exactly the kind of continuing relationship that Kurtz had told Ireland should have been out of bounds—when Kurtz became the host of Reliable Sources.

Of course, Kurtz was not only being paid by CNN—he was being paid by CNN's parent, Time Warner, which also publishes Time, Fortune, Money, and Sports Illustrated, among many other magazines, all of which are also part of Kurtz's beat.

Over the years, Post executive editor Len Downie has offered a variety of flimsy excuses for this odd arrangement. When Kurtz first embarked on his dual employment, the Post's defense was "transparency"—whenever Kurtz wrote about CNN, his editors promised, a tagline would identify him as the host of Reliable Sources. But then Mickey Kaus did a Nexis search of Kurtz's stories and quickly turned up five examples of Kurtz's articles about CNN under which no such disclaimer appeared. And no warning ever appears when Kurtz writes about any other Time Warner properties.

A few years later, Downie explained to Washingtonian magazine that since Kurtz already had a conflict of interest, because his beat included writing about his own newspaper, there was no reason not to expand that conflict exponentially by making it include the whole Time Warner empire. "You're going to have to cover someone who pays you," Downie explained. "Howie has demonstrated in the way that he covers this newspaper that he has no conflict covering an employer. ... When we agreed to let him go work for CNN, I expected that he'd be able to treat that employer as a reporter in the same way that he treats the Washington Post—and he has."

This, of course, is ridiculous. After William Serrin, the former head of New York University's journalism department, told the Los Angeles Times that Kurtz's competing loyalties were "dangerous" and "outrageous," Kurtz tried to demonstrate his objectivity by pointing to an article he had just written about "dumb comments" that had been made by CNN founder Ted Turner.

The trouble with that was that Turner had been detached from CNN for years, and he had long since become one of its fiercest critics. As Eric Alterman pointed out, "It's hard to imagine that anything would please the current [CNN] brass more than beating up on Crazy Old Ted."

Last week I asked who paid Kurtz the most: the Post or CNN? Downie told me he "didn't discuss people's compensation," and Howie replied, "I'm well compensated at both places." I also asked Downie if it was okay for Kurtz to be paid by one of the companies he wrote about—as long as his connection with CNN was well known, why couldn't the Post's Detroit correspondent freelance for General Motors on the same basis?

"In most cases, we only allow freelance work for other media entities (and, in some cases, academic institutions)," Downie said. "So no one here could work for GM."