Media critic Howard Kurtz turned the spotlight on his own failings Sunday, using his CNN show to offer a lengthy apology for an error-filled column this week — a fiasco that was followed by the announcement that he would no longer be employed by The Daily Beast.
But Kurtz, who wrote and then failed to adequately correct an article about NBA player Jason Collins’ coming out as gay, peppered his response with defenses of his career despite a record of mistakes in recent years.
“The mistake that I made was sloppy and inexcusable,” Kurtz said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” “I’m not going to offer any extenuating circumstances. I screwed up.”
After NBA player Jason Collins announced he was gay in a Sports Illustrated column Monday, Kurtz wrongly claimed that Collins had omitted that he was once engaged to a woman. Collins had, in fact, included that information in his column. In a separate video for the website the Daily Download, Kurtz mocked Collins for playing “both sides of the court.”
Kurtz was joined on Sunday’s show by media reporters Dylan Byers of Politico and David Folkenflik of NPR, who grilled him on the series of mistakes Kurtz made this past week.
At one point, Byers asked Kurtz about several errors he has made in the last few years. “You claimed to have interviewed Congressman Darrell Issa, and later admitted you’d actually interviewed one of his aides,” Byers said. “You attributed a quote to Nancy Pelosi that it turns out she did not say. In addition to this, you also said that Fox News host Greta Van Susteren was casting doubts on Hillary Clinton’s illness. In fact, she had been a defender against people who had cast such doubts. ”
“Why so many mistakes?” Byers queried.
“Well, the last two of those were editing mistakes but they were mistakes nonetheless,” Kurtz said.
“In my career, I have written, spoken, blogged millions of words,” Kurtz said. “The vast majority of those have been as accurate as humanly possible. In fact, I pride myself on double and triple checking the facts. But there are times, being a human being, when I have slipped up. I ask people to look at the totality of my record. But it’s certainly fair to point out where I have fallen short.”
Kurtz also used his answer to tout his accomplishments. While promising be more diligent about checking his facts, Kurtz brought up his reporting on the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal at the New York Times a decade ago. “Certainly, in the investigative work that I have done, including exposing Jayson Blair, just ten years ago this past week, the serial fabricator at the New York Times, I double and triple checked everything,” Kurtz said.
Kurtz opened the show with an apology. “Here is what happened and here is why I did what I did and why it was clearly wrongly handled by me,” Kurtz said, looking straight into the camera. “On Monday, I read the ‘Sports Illustrated’ article by Jason Collins, the first pro male-team athlete to come out publicly as gay. I read it too fast and carelessly missed that Jason Collins said he was engaged previously to a woman and then wrote and commented that he was wrong to keep that from readers when, in fact, I was the one who was wrong.”
Kurtz continued: “My logic between what happened between Jason Collins and his former fiance and what was and wasn’t disclosed — in hindsight, well, I was wrong to even raise that and showed a lack of sensitivity to the issue. Also, I didn’t give him a chance to respond to my account before I wrote it and in addition my first correction to the story was not as complete and as full as it should have been.”
Kurtz also denied that his parting ways with the Daily Beast, where he had been working as their Washington bureau chief until this week, was a result of the Collins column. “Well, because of the unfortunate timing some people may have the impression that that is the reason I am leaving The Daily Beast,” Kurtz said. “In fact, this was already in the works. We were moving in different directions.”
