From Instapundit
HOWARD KURTZ, MAGGIE GALLAGHER AND CONFLICTS OF INTEREST: Over at GlennReynolds.com.
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January 26, 2005 | 1:13 PM ET
Scandals tend to come in threes. So we had the Armstrong Williams payola scandal (pretty serious), the DailyKos payola scandal (mostly bogus), and now the Maggie Gallagher scandal, which appears to be mostly bogus, too. An early report from Drudge made things sound a lot like the Armstrong Williams story -- payola in exchange for support. But the actual story from Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post makes clear that Gallagher was actually paid for other work, and in one case the "federal money" was merely money from a nonprofit organization that got federal grants. If there's a story here, it's one that probably applies to half the pundits in Washington.
Should Gallagher have disclosed that? Probably. But you can't disclose everything all the time, and Howard Kurtz is living proof. As Mickey Kaus has noted, Kurtz has plenty of conflicts himself, and he hasn't always disclosed them every time:
A quick search of a popular electronic database--never lie to a man with NEXIS!--turned up the following, just within the past year:
On Dec. 20, 1999, Kurtz wrote about networks, in particular CNN, that lock up "exclusive national rights" to debates between presidential candidates and then shut out competing reporters. Frank Sesno, CNN's Washington bureau chief, was quoted defending the practice. There was no disclosure of Kurtz's CNN connection.
On Nov. 18, 1999, Kurtz wrote about an alliance between one of his employers, the Washington Post, and MSNBC, one of CNN's competitors. Kurtz noted that MSNBC "has been struggling," its ratings having "dropped 20 percent." Kurtz also noted, "By comparison, CNN's ratings dropped 33 percent." (So why wasn't CNN "struggling" too?) No mention of Kurtz's CNN connection.
On Oct. 11. 1999, Kurtz wrote an item about CNN rejecting a commercial from Salon.com. No disclosure.
On Sept. 7, 1999, Kurtz wrote a profile of Rupert Murdoch that touched on the feud between Murdoch and CNN founder Ted Turner, a man who could presumably end Kurtz's CNN career with one well-placed phone call. No disclosure.
On Oct. 18, 1999, Kurtz wrote about Turner's attempts to lure a Wall Street Journal editor to CNNfn to replace Lou Dobbs. Nope.
That's just what I found within the past year. I didn't even check what Kurtz might have written about all the other parts of Time Warner, which owns CNN. I did notice that when the Time Warner empire merged with AOL early this year, Kurtz wrote an item affectionately tweaking Time magazine for being very tough on its corporate parent in its coverage. There was no disclosure that Kurtz also works for Time Warner.
(This is a favorite topic of Kaus's, one that he's hit again and again.) I don't think that Kurtz did anything wrong, and you might argue -- in fact I have argued -- that Kurtz's regular appearances in all these media outlets are themselves effective disclosures. But it does suggest that Kurtz might be a bit more understanding of other people's conflicts. As Kaus also wrote:
In general, I agree that conflicts of interest are overblown (by Howie Kurtz, among others), are to some degree unavoidable, and in some cases might even be desirable.
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So a) Kurtz's conflict, whether or not it should be that big a deal, violates his own pedantic standards, his paper's standards, and the general standards of the mainstream press. That's at least hypocritical and makes Kurtz vulnerable to a Kurtz-like attack.
And Kurtz is, of course, no worse than the rest of the press here (and we'll leave for another day the many journalists who take big speaking fees from organizations that are in the news). The fact is that people like to point to appearances of impropriety and conflicts of interest because it's a way of taking a shot without taking a stand.
The press -- which often has an agenda but doesn't like to make it plain -- loves this sort of attack. (You could write a book on that. In fact, I have.)
People ought to be straight about where they're coming from, and that means disclosing conflicts of interest. But people who make charges of impropriety need to be straight about their motivations, too. And to remember that conflicts-of-interest work both ways.
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