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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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Newsweek off the presses and into the ether

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 15:36:00 +0000

But … But … What incendiary printed matter are we going to flip through at the dentist's office now? On Thursday, editor Tina Brown and CEO Baba Shetty announced on the Daily Beast that Newsweek is going all digital. The Dec. 31 issue will be the final issue to roll off the presses.

It is, as most things Tina Brown–related are, a breathless, truly fabulous statement of intent. "Newsweek Global, as the all-digital publication will be named," the announcement reads, "will be a single, worldwide edition targeted for a highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context." I feel like there might be a test to get a subscription. Godspeed, readers, who will now have to access your Muslim rage and your racist baby and your gay Obama who needs to hit the road in your highly mobile, sophisticated context way. Whatever that is. Not mentioned: declining ad pages and the fact that as recently as last March, Brown was admitting, "We aren’t making money yet and we won’t make money for another couple of years."

Should methadone moms keep their babies?

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 22:21:00 +0000

Imagine losing your child because you are taking a legally prescribed medication as directed—a medication that the Institute of Medicine and the World Health Organization have named as the best treatment for your condition. Now envision that the judge in your family court case is so dismissive of the overwhelming data supporting your use of this treatment that he says, “I can make a paper airplane out of these papers and glide it across the courtroom,” and refuses to read them.

That’s exactly what happened to a young mother, identified pseudonymously as “Rebecca,” who wanted to stay on methadone and keep her baby, as reported in an excellent account on the Daily Beast. Even worse, she is not alone.

Are dumb questions the future of journalism?

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 13:30:00 +0000

Was Mussolini Right?

"He made the trains run on time," they said about Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and it was more than just a cliché. It was a statement about a government that works, a government that means what it says and does what it wants. Sure, there were some problems with the treatment of dissidents. But some very smart political analysts are asking a question that would have been surprising just a few years ago: Is it time to give fascism another try?

To be clear, no one is proposing a Fourth Reich. This isn't about Germany in the 1930s, and it isn't about genocide. It's about fascism as an economic program, where the government stops being ashamed about merging with corporate interests. It's the ultimate pro-business position, and that's why the wonks proposing a new look at an old philosophy have a catchphrase sure to draw adherents: "Fascism means jobs." If they're right, it could remake the American political landscape over the next decade.

No, really, it’s plagiarism

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 21:24:00 +0000

I won’t dwell on this for too long, but last week Fareed Zakaria was suspended from both Time and CNN for plagiarizing a portion of a column (for Time) and a blog post (for CNN) on gun control from a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore. When this came to light, Zakaria immediately apologized:

Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore’s essay in the April 23rd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers.

This was the classy and correct thing to do; after all, this wasn’t a close-call type of case: An entire, 68-word paragraph of Zakaria’s CNN piece had appeared, word-for-word, in Lepore’s essay. In his Time column, Zakaria changed around a few words, but he also borrowed a few more sentences. Here’s Zakaria in Time (the identical words are in bold):