Captain Kurtz: Still steering blindly ahead
02/20/08 09:59 AM
He goes more than a bit over the top down the stretch, but Charles Kaiser of radaronline.com otherwise makes some strong and salient points about the longest-running conflict of interest in American journalism.
That would be Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz's dual pay-for-play relationship with CNN, where he's hosted the Sunday morning Reliable Sources program for more than a decade.
I've written about this previously -- at my previous employer. But it bears repeating. How can Kurtz take a weekly check from CNN while also purportedly covering the all-news network as part of his beat? And wouldn't Kurtz work up a good deal of outrage if, say, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams moonlighted as a paid Democratic party consultant on weekends but said it didn't affect the content of the Peacock's flagship newscast?
The money apparently is just too good, though. So Kurtz continues to take it with the blessings of his employer. You could structure an entire journalism course around the ethics of that.
Ed Bark