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Howard Kurtz and the Daily Beast “part ways” after Jason Collins error

Thu, 02 May 2013 19:34:00 +0000

Howard Kurtz, until today the Washington bureau chief for the Daily Beast, is leaving the company, editor Tina Brown announced via Twitter.

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The tweet is a blunt method of getting the point across. It comes after an even more sharply worded retraction of a Kurtz column that claimed newly out-of-the-closet NBA athlete Jason Collins never mentioned his fiancée in his Sports Illustrated confessional essay. (Collins did mention the fiancée.) Kurtz went on to attempt to clarify his misreading in a manner that only muddied the waters, claiming Collins "downplayed" his past relationships with women and had misled readers about his relationship -- something fairly beyond the scope of the Collins article, and untrue besides.

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Howard Kurtz comes out as illiterate

Thu, 02 May 2013 14:01:00 +0000

Update, 1:00 pm ET: The Daily Beast announced it is retracting Kurtz's column.

Original post:
Howard Kurtz had a bad day yesterday. He wrote this whole column calling out Jason Collins, the NBA player who this week came out as gay, breaking a major American sports barrier and quickly becoming a widely celebrated and admired figure, for not telling readers of his Sports Illustrated piece that he once had a (female) fiancée. Except, one little problem with the entire concept of the piece: Collins explicitly wrote that he'd once been engaged in his Sports Illustrated piece. It took a few minutes for the Internet to point out this titanic error. Then, the the column was altered, without a correction, to say that Collins "downplayed one detail" instead of "left one little part out." Finally, a proper correction was appended.