Howard Kurtz was fired this week from The Daily Beast by executive editor Tina Brown after he published a column on Jason Collins that had to be retracted. Appearing for the first time since the firing on his Sunday CNN show Reliable Sources , Kurtz made an open apology for the massive goof.
Jason Collins recently made NBA history by coming out as a gay athlete while still under contract by the pro organization. As I reported last week, Kurtz got into trouble for a sloppily written piece called, “Jason Collins’ Other Secret,” in which Kurtz claimed that Collins had concealed his eight-years long involvement with a woman.
Far from hiding his ex-fiancé, the Collins statement in Sports Illustrated actually said:
“I didn’t set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. When I was younger I dated women. I even got engaged. I thought I had to live a certain way…”
So it’s a pretty big blunder, since it suggested that Howard Kurtz had not even bothered to read what Collins had to say before slamming him as a liar.
As a media critic and the host of something called Reliable Sources , you’re expected to be…well…at least somewhat reliable.
Kurtz had little choice but to open his Sunday show by acknowledging the problem:
“This time, the media mistake was mine. A big one… 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 I was in fact the one who was wrong. My logic about what happened between Jason Collins and his former fiancee and what was or wasn’t disclosed, in hindsight, well, I was wrong to even raise that issue. It showed a lack of sensitivity…”
He was then grilled for an agonizing 13 minutes by two other media analyists, Politico ‘s Dylan Byers and NPR’s David Folkenflik.
At times, Kurtz sounded defensive: “In my career, I have written, spoken, blogged millions of words…But there are times, being a human being, when I have slipped up.”
CNN has already said that they won’t fire Howard Kurtz over the incident.
[Howard Kurtz photo by David Shankbone via Wikipedia Commons]
