By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 17, 2006; C01

George Rush, a New York Daily News gossip columnist, describes one of the benefits of his job:

"Occasionally you can squeeze the genitalia of powerful people and make them yell or threaten to sue you, and that's kind of a kick."

Kerry Burke, a News reporter, spills the secret of how he gets people to talk: "There are times I've gone to doors and started kicking them, and either that door is gonna give or the person on the other side is gonna answer, because I need that quote."

Tabloid journalism is an art unto itself, a rock-'em, sock-'em, go-for-the-jugular enterprise that conjures up the get-me-rewrite days of newspapering. And these comments in "Tabloid Wars," a six-part Bravo series on the Daily News that debuts next Monday, capture much of the flavor.

With the media's reputation at record lows, reporters are unlikely protagonists these days. They are more often in the spotlight for fabrication or plagiarism, for protecting unnamed sources in tangled scandals, or for publishing classified information that the administration says undermines the war on terror. But the bulk of reporting in this country is local reporting on matters closest to people's lives -- violent crime is a staple, especially in New York -- and that is Bravo's focus.

The reality series, taped last summer, manages to convey a gritty street feel, though the tight-shot emphasis on crime and celebrities misses much of what a newspaper does, such as reporting on schools, subway problems and City Council meetings.

"It's a 'Law and Order'-type show," says Frances Berwick, Bravo's executive vice president. "You're totally into the characters who are doing their job." The network greenlighted the series after looking at an initial tape of interviews with News staffers, Berwick says. "We felt like we were looking into something cloaked in secrecy and a bit of glamour."

The biggest surprise, says Ted Skillman, an executive producer, was the passion of reporters whom he expected to be cynical: "You see Kerry Burke, who'll go all night long until he drops because he wants to get the story, whether it's celebrity fluff or a triple homicide."

While the series makes much of the News's rivalry with the New York Post, it doesn't deal with the business aspects, such as the evaporation of the 229,000-circulation lead that Mort Zuckerman's News had over Rupert Murdoch's Post five years ago. The News now sells 708,000 copies a day compared with 673,000 for the Post.

Newspapers have a checkered history in film and television portrayals. From the poker-playing Chicago characters of "The Front Page" to the gruff city editor of "Lou Grant" and the hero-detectives of "All the President's Men," journalists have often been cast as lovable rogues or dogged crusaders. But "Absence of Malice," the 1981 film in which Sally Field's character sleeps with sources and concocts a bogus story with prosecutors, ushered in an era in which newspaper types were depicted as unethical sensation-seekers. The Bravo series is more in the mold of Ron Howard's film "The Paper," which was filled with swaggering cop reporters and foulmouthed broads -- but it has the additional virtue of being true.

The first episode of "Tabloid Wars" features Burke knocking on doors after an attack in Howard Beach, Queens, that may have been racially motivated, and later chasing a tip that Robert De Niro's nanny stole from him. Rush is seen cozying up to Victoria Gotti at a party.

Taut editing makes it appear that the reporters are always on the go, always up against nerve-racking deadlines. And the News staffers are hammy enough to strike the proper tough-guy pose as cameras trail them around the city.

"What are they gonna do," says Burke, "have endless shots of cats typing on the city desk? They had to find someone out on the streets, and I was their boy." Burke says he sometimes asked the filmmakers to stop because "I'm talking to people who've witnessed homicides, I can't have the camera on. . . . I got real mixed feelings about it because anonymity is an asset, certainly in my end of the game."

Rush was also reluctant about the Bravo venture: "They kind of had to talk us into it. It was a little bit annoying at first. They call it a reality show because that's what sells, but it really is more of a traditional documentary. They didn't try to goose up some confrontation that's not there."

Says Rush's wife and the column's co-writer, Joanna Molloy: "I never got used to it. I would be talking to a source on the phone and all of a sudden this long lens would be poking over the cubicle."

And how did Molloy come off? "Overweight," she says. "I came off as someone who seems to go to parties a lot," even though most exclusives, she says, are obtained in more private settings.

Some of the stories, it must be noted, have a certain odor. Rush and Molloy are seen bringing their dachshund to a screening of the film "Must Love Dogs" and getting the scintillating scoop from Howard Stern's girlfriend, Beth Ostrosky, that Stern helps clean their bulldog's rear end.

Washington Post columnist Michael Kinsley had successful brain surgery last week in an effort to reduce the symptoms of his Parkinson's disease.

In a Time essay written before the operation, Kinsley reveled in the procedure's status as a "conversation stopper": "'So, Mike -- got any summer plans?' 'Why, yes, next Tuesday I'm having brain surgery. How about you?' . . . Brain surgery remains shocking and mystical. People don't expect to run into someone who's having brain surgery next week squeezing the melons at Whole Foods."

The former Slate editor says he dropped his previous approach to Parkinson's -- denial -- because "my symptoms are past the point where dishonesty and self-deception are a useful approach."

New Republic reporter Eve Fairbanks wrote an amusing piece recently on men she had encountered through the ConservativeMatch dating site.

She responded this way to one of them: "I'm petite with curly red-brown hair, and I'm wearing a casual black pinstripe suit with a magenta top. See you this evening!"

In her piece, Fairbanks poked fun at the man -- a lover of Guns & Ammo magazine whom she dubbed "Shooter" -- as being "perched awkwardly on a stool, clad in an oversized white polo with his company's logo on the breast." There was a picture of him, Fairbanks wrote, in a "Club Gitmo" T-shirt on Rush Limbaugh's Web site, which accepts submissions from fans.

Now Shooter has fired back in a posting on Slashdot.org. While he found Fairbanks "bright, charming and very pretty," he says, she never told him she was writing about him in the "Mr. Right" article, even though they stayed in e-mail contact after the date.

Shooter, a Washington area defense contractor who asked that his name be withheld in discussing his dating habits, says in an interview that many friends recognized him from the details and asked when he had started "dressing like a dork. . . . I cannot believe I spent two weeks trying to get a second date with a total dimwit."

Fairbanks says she's "befuddled" by his response. "I was writing a light piece, and I actually think he comes off pretty well. I went to great lengths to totally obscure his identity. It seems to me to be a pretty old and major tradition in journalism to go undercover."

· Katie Couric's six-city "listening tour" was closed to the press, which made for an awkward moment when Minneapolis blogger Matt Bartel was pulled out of the audience after having been invited by the local CBS affiliate. He was told to either surrender his notebook or be expelled. Thankfully, a compromise was reached: Bartel surrendered his pen.

· Paul Steiger, the Wall Street Journal's top editor since 1991, will step down at the end of next year. A Journal memo says a successor will be chosen next spring.

· Ann Coulter is at it again. Rallying to the side of Melanie Morgan, a conservative radio host who says New York Times Editor Bill Keller should be sent to the gas chamber if tried and convicted of treason for publishing national security secrets, Coulter writes: "I prefer a firing squad, but I'm open to a debate on the method of execution."