Howard Kurtz and the WashPost's contempt for its readers
The Washington Post’s media critic Howard Kurtz today uses his Post column to send a gushing love letter to Time Magazine and its executives. Entitled “Thinner Time magazine still manages to stand out,” it reads like a Time Warner Press Release heaping praise on its magazine for great success. The first sentence crowns Time Editor-in-Chief Rick Stengel as “the last man standing,” trumpets Time’s success in comparison to the struggles ofNewsweek and U.S. News, and claims — most hilariously of all — that “Time has done it mainly with serious journalism.”
What makes this so amazing is that Kurtz himself does not merely sound like an employee of Time Warner; he is one. Time Warner pays him a substantial salary — and gives him a prominent television platform — for hosting CNN’s Sunday morning show, Reliable Sources. In return, Kurtz then uses his Post column to glorify Time Warner’s magazine and its executives. The fact that The Washington Post employs as its media critic an employee of Time Warner, the largest media conglomerate in the world, has to be the most mammoth and inexcusable conflict of interest in American journalism, one that simply cannot be cured even with full disclosure.
Recent comments
Blog comments powered by DisqusNotes
-
eggplantia5 liked this
-
enteekaygee liked this
-
irredenta liked this
-
brooklynmutt reblogged this from ericmortensen
-
aatombomb liked this
-
ericmortensen reblogged this from kateoplis
-
sixagon liked this
-
diegueno liked this
-
nathanonline liked this
-
markcoatney said:
To be fair, I always thought Kurtz was more just a crappy journalist than he was in the tank for someone…
-
kateoplis posted this
