"Jill Abramson, the veteran journalist who led the newspaper from 2011 to 2014, says the Times has a financial incentive to bash the president and that the imbalance is helping to erode its credibility...."

"Abramson describes a generational split at the Times, with younger staffers, many of them in digital jobs, favoring an unrestrained assault on the presidency. 'The more "woke" staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,' she writes [in her forthcoming book 'Merchants of Truth']. Trump claims he is keeping the 'failing' Times in business—an obvious exaggeration—but the former editor acknowledges a 'Trump bump' that saw digital subscriptions during his first six months in office jump by 600,000, to more than 2 million. 'Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated.'"

From "Former NY Times editor rips Trump coverage as biased" by Howard Kurtz (Fox News).

Howard Kurtz observes the obvious about the media grudgingly noting the obvious.

"Media start admitting that Trump's first year isn't a flop."

"It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the [Iowa] party establishment is trying to protect Hillary."

Says Howard Kurtz, observing the suppression of the raw vote totals.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that McGuire, an Iowa co-chairman of Clinton’s 2008 campaign, drives a Buick with the license plate HRC2016.

"I’m not going to get my own room, am I?" Mariel Hemingway asked Woody Allen... when she was 18 and he was in his early 40s.

They were making the movie "Manhattan" together, and he'd been trying to get her to go to Paris with him. When he — as Howard Kurtz puts it — "fumbled for his glasses," she announced: "I can’t go to Paris with you."

The headline chez Kurtz (at Fox News) is: "Young Mariel Hemingway had to rebuff Woody Allen’s advances."

Is that fair? I know it's fun to kick Woody Allen around, but "rebuff... advances" creates a picture of him groping her. And "Young Mariel Hemingway" suggests an underage female (like the character Hemingway played in "Manhattan"). But it was a powerful and not-all-that-old movie star inviting an adult female into an old-school romantic adventure. I mean — it's a romance cliché! — Paris.

Yeah, older men like younger women and trips to Paris are tempting. It may be a little hard to say no, but I can't believe there was that much scheming and trapping going on here, because how smart do you have to be — and I hear Woody's a genius — to figure out that you get the young lady to isolate herself with you in Paris by saying "Of course, you'll have your own room, and it will be a beautiful room in this charming hotel, blah blah blah. I would simply love to show you Paris, blah blah blah, museums... restaurants... the Seine blah, blah, blah"" You figure out how to lure her into your room after you're there.

"Why is Warren depicted as populist true believer and Cruz as a wacko bird?"

To ask the question is to make the point that needs to be made.

What's happening these days at Grey Gardens?

For many of us, Grey Gardens means Big Edie and Little Edie in a movie engraved on our hearts. Rufus Wainwright sang about that.

But here it is mentioned by Howie Kurtz, who's at Fox News these days, taking a shot at Pari Bradlee, the daughter-in-law of Ben Bradlee, who once ran WaPo, the newspaper Kurtz abandoned:

Her new [Facebook[ profile picture, in a Swiss-cheese bra that leaves little to the imagination and long black leather sleeves and briefs, is so revealing that it drew a torrent of breathless comments....

"I have worked so hard all my life and always wanted to feel and be beautiful inside and out," Bradlee writes on Facebook. "I own my sensuality and teach others not to repress it. Femininity for me is a very powerful and beautiful force."...

The photo shoot took place at Grey Gardens, the fabled, 14-room East Hampton mansion, once featured in a movie, that the former Washington Post editor bought with his wife a quarter-century ago.

A movie. A Swiss-cheese bra.

I got to Kurtz's place via WaPo, where Erik Wemple is casting aspersions on Kurtz, calling his reporting a "nothing-sandwich posting." Is that a nothing sandwich with Swiss cheese?

Everyone knows at Grey Gardens, you eat liver paté.

"Should a five-year-old have a gun?/Why Ann doesn't like to take positions on policy questions/Gun deaths are declining, but what about spree killings?..."

"Chris Christie: Can a fat man win the presidency?/Howard Kurtz, Jason Collins, Tina Brown, and honesty/Benghazi: scandal or hype?" — those are the basic topics, as framed by the Bloggingheads enterprise, as I talk for 70+ minutes with Bob Wright.

Here's the whole thing:



I'll pull out some choice bits in a little while.

"Kurtz had a string of high-profile mistakes on his record and that had become a source of embarrassment for The Daily Beast."

And "he commanded a hefty paycheck, despite turning out fewer scoops than in the past," write  Dylan Byers and Katie Glueck, citing anonymous sources at the Daily Beast and CNN.

“People here have been groaning about Howie for years,” a source at CNN said. “He’s like the Dick Morris of media critics — just shoddy and out of the game.”...

“It became clear to folks here that Howie had a lot of other commitments, and that that wasn’t working,” a Daily Beast source said....

Despite having his own show on CNN, Kurtz has dedicated much of his recent time to a new venture: a website called “The Daily Download,” where he regularly appears in video segments with the site’s founder and editor Lauren Ashburn. That preoccupation seems to have taken a toll on Kurtz’s attention span and focus....

”What would I go to this site for? As another place Howard Kurtz does his able thing on the week’s media news? Okay, but why does he need that? And why do we? He’s got the Daily Beast and CNN: plenty of platform,” Jay Rosen, the New York University journalism professor, wrote in an email to POLITICO. “Daily Download resists understanding.”

"Resists understanding" is a nice phrase.

Why are the figures on our national stage so lacking in greatness?

I wonder — as I scan the news this morning for topics and stop to think about Howard Kurtz and Jason Collins. Kurtz isn't a bold or great writer. He was dependent on Tina Brown, and he crossed a line, got a little edgy but didn't bother to sharpen up for the attempted edginess, and he got cut. Tina Brown runs her various operations. Is she at the level that should awe us?

Jason Collins was never a great basketball player. It's pathetic — a literal joke — that must we look at basketball to find men to look up to. (They are tall.) But this week, we're expected to admire this athlete we hadn't heard of before not for any athletic achievement but for the miniature feat of revealing — after years and years of hiding — that he's gay. Did he risk anything? His revelation comes at the end of his lackluster career, he's receiving plaudits from everyone on up to Barack Obama, and since his college days, he's had powerful political friends including Chelsea Clinton and (his erstwhile roommate) Joe Kennedy.

Is Barack Obama a great man? He's reached the top position. That takes some doing. He scrambled up over a number of people — were they great? — and he maintained his position, but is he great? We — some of us — like him. He seems like a good person — to some people, the ones who feel comfortable enough with him because at least he's not Bush, he's got a nice smile that reminds us of hope and Republicans seem mean, and it's not really his fault that there are so many problems.

And how about those Clintons and Kennedys and — as long as we're listing American dynasties — Bushes? There are no giants here. Why are the figures on our national stage so lacking in greatness?

It must be us. This must be our doing. Our preference.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jonas quotes George Carlin:

"Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.'"

Henry and Balfegor both mention Steve Jobs as the last great man. When I wrote "Kurtz isn't a bold or great writer," I immediately thought Christopher Hitchens.

"Howard Kurtz leaves Daily Beast following Jason Collins column mistake."

Kurtz, whose area of expertise is media criticism, made a mistake in the media that drew some criticism and what looks like swift retaliation.

... Kurtz mistakenly accused Collins of leaving out “one detail” in Collins’s Sports Illustrated essay disclosing his homosexuality. The detail, Kurtz said, was that Collins “was engaged. To be married. To a woman.”...

Kurtz initially amended his Daily Beast story, saying Collins “downplayed” the engagement and “didn’t dwell on it.” But the Daily Beast retracted the story entirely after the mistake and subsequent amendments drew heavy criticism from several Web sites.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bill said:

But Collins did attempt to obscure his engagement. This is what he wrote: "When I was younger I dated women. I even got engaged."

That sure sounds like someone who got engaged young, not someone who cancelled a wedding at the age of about 30 after an eight year relationship. While his statement was technically true (everything in our past was when we were younger), it had to have been intentionally misleading, especially coming from a Stanford grad.

I agree, and you put that so much better than Kurtz did in his correction. This is an important basis for criticism of Collins, who's being hailed as a hero. Giving up on living a lie is a good idea, but it's not heroic. Maybe 30 years ago, it was heroic to be openly gay, but even back then, if you chose to keep your sexual orientation quiet, it was still wrong to delude another person to the extent that Collins apparently did. Collins graduated from Stanford in 2001, and it's just ridiculous that someone who lived in that environment at that time — he roomed with Joe Kennedy and was friends with Chelsea Clinton — would be seriously burdened with backward ideas about sexual orientation. I'll refrain from lambasting the man for his deceit and cowardice, but extolling him as a hero is absurd. I think that's what Kurtz might have wanted to say, but he botched his attack.

It would be interesting to know which powerful Democrats, if any, interacted with Tina Brown over the downfall of Howard Kurtz.

"Gregory had no intent to commit a crime; he was committing journalism instead."

"Gun owners often say they want the government to leave them alone; why then are some clamoring for Gregory to be prosecuted?"

Asks Howard Kurtz, with amazing naivete. The implied argument is quite weird and perverse.

First, he's got this either/or premise: If you're doing one thing, you're not doing something else. If you're doing journalism, you can't also be doing something else. That might make sense if the crime in question had a required mental element that would be negated by the intent to "commit journalism," but it doesn't. Mere possession is enough. The most virtuous individuals with the best intentions get stuck with this law applying to them. If you don't like that, then you don't like this law. You've got an objection to the law, and yet, ironically, Gregory was arguing for more laws like that! That was the nature of the "journalism" he was "committing." He ought to be the first one prosecuted, not the last.

Second, Kurtz, a journalist himself, is mired the same sense of entitlement that people are objecting to in Gregory. He thinks journalists are special people who float above it all, who don't live in reality. You are the very people who are supposed to be observing reality, understanding it, and explaining it. But you don't even see that you are part of it. You have less awareness of it than the people you're getting paid to inform. Maybe you think you're just too important to have your time wasted by consequences that would befall ordinary people. You need to be free to continue to sit there mouthing outrage about the next terrible thing that befalls some ordinary person out there in the real world.

Third, Kurtz thinks he's caught others in hypocrisy. If gun owners want the government to leave them alone, why would they want Gregory to be prosecuted? It's like Kurtz wants us to laugh in his face. Yet he seems to think he's being quite clever. Why would he think that? Puzzling, isn't it? My only answer is that he does not believe in the rule of law. It doesn't occur to him that what gun owners who "want the government to leave them alone" want is for legislatures to refrain from passing laws and to repeal existing laws and for courts to declare laws null under the Second Amendment. Why should these people like it if one privileged, prominent man escapes prosecution? The laws remain, affecting everyone else, even as the oppressiveness of the laws is falsely minimized.

Obama didn't "fall flat." He went low key on purpose. Here's the reason.

Politico is all "Obama fell flat."

A surprisingly long parade of Democrats and media commentators who didn’t think much of the speech described it less as a failure than a fizzle—an oddly missed opportunity to frame his presidency or the nation’s choice in a fresh or inspirational light.

Blah blah blah. But here's Howard Kurtz with the response Pee-Wee Herman made famous: I meant to do that.

Kurtz says Obama's speech was the result of careful focus-group testing.

Strategists felt they were in a box, unable to meet the twin goals of style and substance at once. To be sure, Obama wanted to excite the party’s liberal base. But his brain trust was convinced that they would have gotten killed by going with a red-meat speech that simply bashed Republicans without detailing what Obama would do in the next four years....

Dial-twisting focus-groupers, strategists-in-a-box, a brain trust. Where is the man himself, the candidate, the President? I don't see the excuse here, Howie. It's like you're saying he is the empty chair.

"The Rupert Murdoch tabloid loves to package other people’s reporting in World War III headlines."

Writes Howard Kurtz, mocking the New York Post article that has the headline "Mary Kennedy pummeled RFK Jr., ran over family dog and threatened to kill herself for years: court papers," which begins: "Robert Kennedy Jr.’s wife, Mary, beat him up, tried to blackmail him, killed the family dog and, finally, told a servant she needed rope for a new couch — then hanged herself with it, according to a bombshell report.”

The "other people’s reporting" used by the NY Post is in Newsweek/Daily Beast, which is Kurtz's employer. That article is headlined "Exclusive: The Last Days of Mary Kennedy," with a subtitle: "She was the love of Bobby Jr.’s life. Then everything unraveled. In Newsweek, bestselling Kennedy historian Laurence Leamer reveals the heartbreaking story of Mary’s long decline." Heartbreaking. Love of his life. That goes to a different extreme, trying to appeal to a different audience — presumably women who adore bestselling Kennedy historians.

It's not surprising that the Post — like a blogger — would pull out the most lurid details and state them plainly, for readers who don't want the romance and don't need their suicide porn swathed in the pretense of respectability.

From the hardcore Post:

"Why publish the story then when you couldn't answer the essential question: What precisely is Herman Cain alleged to have done to these women?"

Howard Kurtz asks Politico's Jonathan Martin. Martin flails desperately, and Kurtz keeps going after him.

MR. KURTZ: I think at a lot of news organizations an editor would have said... you don't have the details of the sexually suggestive behavior that made them angry. Go back and get more. You could have waited, there was nothing forcing you to publish this last Sunday.

Martin blabbers. Kurtz makes him suffer. Watch the video at the link.

Meanwhile, on "Meet the Press," David Gregory had a chance to interrogate Maggie Haberman, whom he identifed as "Politico's reporter covering the Cain story." Gregory asked her absolutely nothing about Politico's behavior. He put up a quote from Cain, saying he'd like to leave the story behind and "get back on message," and asks her "So how does he really do that when there are more questions, which are primarily what?"

MS. MAGGIE HABERMAN: Well, I think among the questions are does he remember the second woman who we reported on? He says he has no memory of her whatsoever. Other media outlets have confirmed that there was another woman who had made some kind of complaint about sexually inappropriate behavior.

MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

MS. HABERMAN: And Mr. Cain's campaign last night not only said they don't want to talk about this anymore, but they, you know, said they were going to email people the code of ethics from the Society of Professional Journalists, and did to one of my colleagues. I think this is where you're going to see the pivot. They are going to say the media is out to get him. I think that it has served them well this week.

MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

MS. HABERMAN: I think that's how he's gotten around some conflicting answers about what's happened. I don't know that he's going to be able to not answer or at least not get asked them anymore, going forward.

At that point, Gregory moves on to another guest. That is, he lobbed Haberman a question that she was able to use to place the burden on Cain to come forward with the details, and Gregory asked nothing. Unless you consider "Mm-hmm" to be something. Haberman mentioned the code of ethics from the Society of Professional Journalists, but that did not rouse Mr. Gregory from his slumbers. Tim Russert would have grilled her. She needed grilling. Why have her on the show and not interrogate her?

"As a plain-vanilla candidate, Romney is never going to win the excitement primary."

"A telling moment occurred when Sarah Palin stole the spotlight by taking her bus tour to New Hampshire on the day that Romney was officially kicking off his candidacy there. He lost the battle of the headlines as the Manchester Union Leader splashed Palin on the front page and ran Romney’s announcement inside the paper. But he remains the front-runner—though his staff recoils from the term—and she remains a long-shot celebrity with high negatives."

Howard Kurtz. The article is called "Mitt Romney, Boring Genius?" I think the suggestion is not that Romney is a genius but he's boring. It's that he's a genius at being boring.

"I could not have imagined doing this five years ago, as a guy who just plain likes paper."

Howard Kurtz, on leaving The Washington Post to join The Daily Beast.

Reporters [have] asked me what this meant for the death of print or the decline of The Post. I pushed back, as I happen to believe that newspapers are going to be around for a long time. Let's not get carried away here.... Still, there's an awful lot of energy and excitement in the Web world.

Yes, there is.

"Sarah Palin rips non-Muslim Obama over mosque while Lady Gaga remains silent."

Sorry. I'm just trying to rip off Howard Kurtz.

"We have the nirvana that people are looking for."

Says Rick Stengel, the managing editor of Time Magazine.

Eh... I think I'll look for the nirvana that you can't look for. That seems more nirvana-y. 

"I don't think you can be a journalist and carry water for a politician, and that's what they were doing: 'Here's the line on Palin.'"

"These are political hacks, and I think they should stop calling themselves journalists. It discredits the rest of us."

So said Tucker Carlson, quoted in a Howard Kurtz analysis of the Journolist leaks on The Daily Caller.

Kurtz concludes: "None of this quite adds up to a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, and there is no reason to believe that some conservative commentators don't have similar discussions. But there is no escaping the fact that some of the list's liberal literati come off sounding like cagey political operatives."

"Sherrod may be the only official ever dismissed because of the *fear* that Fox host Glenn Beck might go after her."

Notes Howard Kurtz:

As Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack tried to pressure her into resigning, Sherrod says Deputy Under Secretary Cheryl Cook called her Monday to say "do it, because you're going to be on 'Glenn Beck' tonight." And for all the focus on Fox, much of the mainstream media ran with a fragmentary story that painted an obscure 62-year-old Georgian as an unrepentant racist....

The administration's concern about Beck stems in part from his campaign last year that prompted the resignation of White House environmental official Van Jones over divisive remarks -- a controversy that some news organizations acknowledged they were too slow to cover. Ironically, Beck defended Sherrod on Tuesday, saying that "context matters" and he would have objected if someone had shown a video of him at an AA meeting saying he used to pass out from drinking but omitting the part where he says he found Jesus and gave up alcohol.