Howard Kurtz has been The Washington Post's media reporter since 1990. He is also the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources" and the author of "Media Circus," "Hot Air," "Spin Cycle" and "The Fortune Tellers: Inside Wall Street's Game of Money, Media and Manipulation." Kurtz talks about the press and the stories of the day in "Media Backtalk."

Reporters as Detectives , ( Post, Oct. 23, 2006 )

The transcript follows.

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Washington, D.C.: Mr. Kurtz: I am one of those readers who is "stealing" your work product by only consuming it on-line for free. But I am also one of those (seemingly few) people who support what the "MSM" does, as far as objective reporting, investigative reporting, and news analysis. I think that bloggers and such, while great, can only exist because the vast majority of them piggyback off of your work.

But I would be stupid to pay for something I can get for free. Cutting staff will save money now, but that doesn't stop the bleeding. Wringing your hands over lower circulation and competition from amateur journalists will only do so much. The news industry is changing, and someone needs to figure out how to keep making money off of it. At what point is it your industry's obligation to come up with a revised business plan?

Howard Kurtz: I don't regard you as a thief. We do get some ad revenue from the Web site, and it brings our work to the world beyond D.C., Maryland and Virginia, where the paper version is available. If you don't feel the need to flip the pages and discover stories and columns that you might miss online, so be it. My point is that Web revenues, at least at this moment in time, can't support the kind of staff that makes The Post the paper it is (or the NYT, LAT, USA Today etc.). Can't support the kind of depth that does the kind of investigative reporting for which the paper is known (along with sports coverage, movie reviews, foreign bureaus and on and on). That's our problem, not yours. But it is a problem.

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Rolla, Mo.: A "what liberal media" question -- Yesterday on MTP Tim Russert had his panel consisting of John Harwood, Bob Novak, David Broder, and Charlie Cook. I count 2 conservatives, one centrist and a independent. So, where is the liberal pundit here? Broder has definitely been on the centrist bandwagon lately, so he's not it. I realize that not every program has to have equal balance, but when it doesn't it is jarring.

Howard Kurtz: I'm not sure who is the second conservative on your list after Novak. Broder, Harwood and Cook are all known as pretty much down-the-middle guys.

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New York, N.Y.: Hi Howard: This may have been hashed over already, but I'm curious as to why the media don't correct Bush et al. when they refer to the opposition as the 'Democrat' party. It's clearly wrong, isn't it, and isn't it meant to be a pejorative? Yet, even in print, it's not corrected or explained. I'm just puzzled as to why it's gone on for as long as it has, and exactly what it's supposed to accomplish. Seems like sandbox-level to me. Has The Post made a decision on how to handle this? Thanks.

Howard Kurtz: A couple of columnists have scolded Bush for that. I'm surprised he does it. If he wants to make cut-and-run charges, etc., that's his right, but at least pronounce the name of the party correctly.

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Arlington, Va.: I cannot BELIEVE that you are equating the filing of corrected disclosure reports re Harry Reid's land sale, and Duke Cunningham's criminal bribe. What was Senator Reid's crime? From what I've read, he bought the land several years ago, before he was in the Senate leadership. He did not use his office to make any illegal profit. Your strive for "balance" is disingenuous, yet you leave out the Dennis Hastert land deal, where he used the power of his office to push through a highway bill, near land that he owned, and sold it at a 200% profit. Yeah, there are corrupt Democrats, but don't equate a legitimate land deal with the now rampant corruption within the Republican party.

Howard Kurtz: I'm not equating anything. I am merely listing the controversies involving members of Congress that were broken by reporters. Obviously the Harry Reid land deal is light-years away from the corruption of a Duke Cunningham or Bob Ney. But it did prompt the Senate minority leader to revise his financial disclosure statements. I don't know why anyone would get the impression that I'm suggesting all these cases are equally bad. What they have in common is that the press acted as a catalyst.

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Ocala, Fla.: Howie,

Could you explain what the duties of a publisher are vs those of a managing editor? How does an owner/publisher differ from a "hired" publisher (other than the former can't be fired...)?

Howard Kurtz: A managing editor (or editor) is an editorial employee who worries only about news coverage (although at some papers the editor also oversees the editorial page, which I think is an awful idea). The publisher, whether appointed or a case of the owner appointing himself, is responsible for the whole business side of the paper, and has input (ranging from absolute to mild) into the stances of the editorial page, including endorsements.

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Paying for online access: I gave up my paper subscription, except for Sundays, simply to cut down on the amount of paper that comes into my house - but I'd happily pay for online access to the Post, to assuage my lingering guilt over reading for free what I used to pay for - happily paying for a "premium" subscription at the NYTimes, for that same reason (and there I don't even have a Sunday subscription). Any word on how the NYTimes experiment is working?

Howard Kurtz: We'd be happy to have you make an online contribution for the Post, but unfortunately (from a business point of view), most Web users have gotten spoiled and expect all content to be free. The NYT experiment of charging non-subscribers 50 bucks a year for columnists, archives and other special features has been a financial success that has brought the company a good bit of extra revenue. But it means that many fewer people, perhaps millions, see the work of Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Frank Rich, etc. and that they are much less a part of the online conversation. I still excerpt them occasionally but no longer provide links, which are useless to non-subscribers.

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New Haven, Conn.: Howie, two things about "Reporters as Detectives." First, it's worth pointing out that a very small percentage of the reporters in any newsroom do investigative work. Cutting a newsroom staff from 900 to 800 may impact investigative work, or not, since it all depends on which jobs are cut. Second, in my experience, and I suspect yours, in all too many cases "investigative" journalism winds up being a case of a reporter deciding to run with material given him or her by someone's political opponents. Sometimes, as with Dan Rather, they get caught. What proportion of "investigative" journalism do you suppose falls into that category?

Howard Kurtz: As a onetime investigative reporter, I strongly disagree with your second point. Maybe in the heat of a campaign a lot of oppo research gets dumped on journalists, but stories like those involving Abramoff, Ney, Cunningham and Weldon were painstakingly assembled from public records and interviews -- the old-fashioned way, in other words. But I also think you're defining investigative reporting too narrowly, as if it only counts if you have a segregated unit of folks spending months on projects. Beat reporters do investigative digging all the time. But they might need a week or two to do the extra work required, in addition to their regular responsibilities. If you've got one reporter covering city hall or the statehouse or the local congressional delegation, that becomes very hard because of the demands for daily copy. If you've got two people sharing a beat, you can trade off and it becomes more feasible. That's where the pinch may be felt on investigative work. A Post editor, by the way, told me this morning that this paper has expanded its investigative unit, even during the recent period of buyouts that have reduced the staff by about 8 percent.

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Downsizing MSM: Howard: Is it possible that the MSM newsroom cutbacks reflect a combination of big business interests and (dare I type it) overpriced journalists? Maybe a high-priced anchor could forgo a few benjamins to rescue a researcher or two.

Howard Kurtz: Look, some places may be overstaffed, and in television, big salaries for anchors and star correspondents are definitely a budgetary factor. I'm not saying all cutbacks are bad. But when you have a Dallas Morning News or Cleveland Plain Dealer reducing its newsroom staff by as much as 20 percent, or NBC cutting 5 percent of all jobs, over time that has an impact.

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Regarding MTP: "Howard Kurtz: I'm not sure who is the second conservative on your list after Novak. Broder, Harwood and Cook are all known as pretty much down-the-middle guys. "

Then by your count, that's 1 con, 3 mid-the-road, and zero liberal/progressives.

Does that count for balance in today's media?

Howard Kurtz: It's only a problem if you believe that every single panel on every single show at every single moment must be perfectly balanced on a scale, as opposed to achieving a rough balance over time.

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Washington, D.C.: You may be right that by listing the Reid land deal along with Cunningham etc. you meant no harm, but others have pointed out that CNN and papers have focused on it quite a bit and seem to do so to balance what would otherwise be a series of Republican-only scandals. The problem is the Reid land deal looks pretty innocuous -- so he failed to update a disclosure to show that the partnership had been dropped into a LLC -- tell me how that belongs in the same list as Cunningham, Abramoff, Ney and even Hastert's own land deal (where there is no evidence of wrong doing but a much clearer motive).

Howard Kurtz: I take no position on whether it was innocuous. But clearly, the major corruption scandals this year have involved Republicans -- Cunningham, Ney, Foley, Abramoff. There is no question about that. The only significant exception is William (90K in the freezer) Cunningham, although no charges have yet been brought in that case.

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Washington, D.C.: I noticed last week that when the New York Times was featuring the astounding profits from Google, it also ran a story about the tanking advertising revenues for newspapers. Summertime is supposed to be slower for Google because people get outdoors, but Google increased profits despite a slow season and a huge revenue number from last year to top. Do you sense that there is a big, airline-industry/auto-industry style tsunami of losses that are about to wash upon the shores of the print newspaper industry?

Howard Kurtz: Not losses, no. You might get the impression from all these layoff and buyout stories that newspapers are in the red. Actually, they make plenty of money, many of them with profit margins around 20 percent. The reason for the cutbacks is that their corporate owners, under pressure from Wall Street, want to push those margins even higher. Most industries would kill for the kind of profit margins that newspapers enjoy. But they are suffering a significant reduction in classified advertising, and the big threat there is not Google but services like Craigslist.

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Paper vs. Online: Did you read Kinsley's piece a while back in which his contention was that the physical paper costs about 50 cents to manufacture and deliver, so eliminating that part of the business might be a wash? Hard to imagine that before widespread wi-fi, but an interesting commentary.

From a business standpoint, we place a lot of ads in local papers for our clients, and the current pattern (don't know about The Post) of increasing rates to maintain revenues, even as circulation drops, is turning a lot of our dollars elsewhere.

Howard Kurtz: Well, that's a problem, because such advertising remains the lifeblood of the paper (and some people actually like getting the paper because of the ads). A nagging problem for many big-city dailies has been the demise of local department stores and other retailers that used to buy a truckload of ads. In this market, Woodies, Hechts, Garfinkel's, Hechinger's are all toast.

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Arlington, Va.: Last week, some gay activist claimed to have outed a Republican Senator from the Northwest (Bill Maher mentioned it on his HBO show) and the local D.C. gay newspaper mentioned a similar accusation about a Republican gubernatorial candidate in the South. Is a person's sexual orientation a legitimate news story, or is it only when the protagonist steps over the line somehow?

Howard Kurtz: I know the case you're talking about. I wrote about it in my blog. Two newspapers in the senator's home state ran stories on the controversy. I don't think news organizations should be in the business of outing people unless there's some overriding reason (cyberstalking House pages, hitting on an employee) to do so. ABC's Brian Ross told me yesterday on Reliable Sources that the activist in question brought him the same information and he had no interest in pursuing it.

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Podcast: Howard, I tried to download the podcast version of your CNN show, but it looks like only the "video" version is available. This file is like 300MB, and takes an hour to download! You should suggest to your computer people that they also post an audio version, like several other shows do. I and others would love to listen to this!

Howard Kurtz: I will pass that on. Of course, there IS the alternative of actually watching!

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Arlington, Va.: The NYT Public Editor now says the paper was wrong to publish their story on allegedly illegal financial tracking of terrorist funds. While I appreciate his honesty, this is not quite an apology from the editor or publisher; should we expect one to follow in the near future? Can an ombudsman, including The Post's, do anything to force a correction or apology besides highlight the mistakes in their column?

Howard Kurtz: No. The ombudsman speaks only for himself or herself. Calame's job, as a contract employee, is to hold the paper accountable, not pressure the editors into doing anything. Bill Keller obviously disagrees strongly or he wouldn't have published the story.

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Mobile, Ala.: Howie, I would say that now that there are cut-backs and low circulation in papers, maybe journalists will work harder for their stories, their readers and their paper rather than just sitting around getting spoon fed like they have been in the past and is probably the reason for the cut-backs and low circulation of newspapers, especially NYT and Washington Post.

Howard Kurtz: Spoonfed? If you had ever spent a day in a newsroom, my friend, you'd see that everyone (well, almost everyone) hustles pretty hard. Are the reporters who exposed the corruption of several members of Congress being spoonfed? Are the reporters who are being shot at in Iraq and Afghanistan being spoonfed? I don't think so.

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Arlington, Va.: I have a question about the NFL stadium scare from last week: The Web site it was on was laughably non-terrorist-related and it was a single line of text, so how did it become such a huge story? I would think Homeland Security must come across these types of messages constantly--some idiot in a chatroom types something stupid. I understand DHS needs to follow-up any and all threats, but is it typical for them to alert the press about ALL these types of threats, no matter how dubious, or does this only occur three weeks before an election?

Howard Kurtz: I blame the media. Homeland Security can alert all it wants, but news organizations have to make the judgment whether something like that is credible, and it seemed to me to be transparently phony from the start. Even DHS officials were saying there was no credible evidence that dirty bombs would be set off at 7 football stadiums. But some networks nevertheless played it up.

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New York, N.Y.: Howard,

I think I already know the answer to this question, but...

Once the stories have been written about the results of the mid-term elections, do you believe that the media will immediately focus on the 2008 presidential election (overwhelming breaking news notwithstanding)?

Howard Kurtz: Why wait? I think they're focusing on the 2008 presidential election NOW.

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Buffalo, N.Y.: Hi Howard, I am surprised that GWB's statement on ABC yesterday that "well, hey, listen, we've never been "stay the course, George." hasn't gotten more play, since it seems like such an obvious contradiction to so many statements by the Pres. and his minions. What am I missing?

Howard Kurtz: It's a semantic argument. Critics of the war say Bush wants the country to stay the course, that is, keep American troops there fighting the war until the end of his presidency. Bush, not liking the phrase, says he's not staying the course because the military is constantly adjusting based on enemy tactics. But the bottom line is he wants to keep a large contingent of American forces there indefinitely, or at least until that magical day when the Iraqis stand up so we can stand down.

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Alexandria, Va.: Did you see Lesley Stahl's interview with Nancy Pelosi last night, and did it compare in any way with Stahl's hit piece on Tom DeLay? I'm biased, but it seems to me that CBS investigates Republicans, and only interviews Democrats. Stahl seemed to be telling Pelosi she had all the toughness she needed to lead the House. Would it be better if CBS let a man interview Pelosi, rather than a you-go-girl cheerleader?

Howard Kurtz: Better to let a MAN interview Pelosi? What century are you living in? I didn't see the piece, but I would point out that that Pelosi, unlike DeLay, is not under criminal indictment and was not admonished three times by the House ethics committee.

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Tysons Corner, Va.: The question from Rolla, Mo., assumed two conservatives. I think it's pretty obvious that the reader counts John Harwood as conservative, simply because Harwood writes for the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal is perceived as a conservative bastion because of its influential editorial page, but most folks don't read it and therefore don't realize that much of WSJ's news coverage is, if anything, slanted Left. There was an objective study of this phenomenon about a year ago, citing WSJ as the most "liberal" of the major newspapers in coverage of news stories. Not editorials, but news stories.

So, Harwood might be a good journalist, but Rolla, Mo., should not assume that he's a conservative.

Howard Kurtz: Ah. That must be it. Whereas when I think of the Journal newsroom, I don't think of a place that's ideological, in stark contrast to Paul Gigot and the gang at the editorial page, which is so separate it has its own Web site.

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Washington, D.C.: The authorities were able to sideline the threat on football stadiums just a few days. Would we have a better chance of catching terrorists if they included an interruption to sports revenues in their videos?

Howard Kurtz: They didn't sideline the threat; there was no threat. It was a deliberate hoax. Some guy in Wisconsin was arrested last week for posting the bogus threat.

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Catonsville, Md.: What do you know about MSNBC laying off 700 employees and closing their production location? Operations will be moved to NYC.

Howard Kurtz: MSNBC is moving most employees to 30 Rock, but the 700 figure is the number of jobs that will be cut across the NBC network and its cable networks.

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Washington, D.C.: Wow! You are wrong. It's not an argument about semantics. Bush himself has said he wants to "stay the course" in Iraq. It's not the critics saying it, he's saying it.

Seriously, it's this type of mistake that makes people distrust mainstream media.

Howard Kurtz: Bush used the phrase in the past, critics seized on it and now he's trying to change the language by changing his emphasis. My point is, his basic position hasn't changed. If you want to argue that he's walking away from rhetoric that he himself used, you're right.

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San Francisco, Calif.: Hello, Howard, thanks for joining us to chat today. Several years ago, at the height of the Iraq War, most nightly network broadcasts highlighted "Fallen Heroes" to remind Americans of the real cost of this war. Now that October has become the deadliest month for U.S. troops since January 2005, don't you think network newscasts should resume honoring our war dead in this fashion?

Howard Kurtz: CBS was the one doing Fallen Heroes. All the newscasts have devoted attention to the plight of soldiers and reservists, but no one is doing it as a regular brief feature right now.

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Woodhaven, N.Y.: Ok, Howard,

Who are you picking: Tigers or Cardinals?

Howard Kurtz: Hey, I'm an objective journalist! I can't possibly take a stand. Plus, I'm still numb over the Yankees getting blown out so early.

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Worms, Germany: People have said that the impact of the Foley scandal will depend on how long it remains in the news, especially in the local news. Now that the scandal seems to recede even from the national news, is it fair to assume that it is now basically yesterday's story on therefore will not have much of an impact on the elections?

Howard Kurtz: Well, it will certainly have an impact in Foley's Florida district and has tightened the upstate New York race of Tom Reynolds, the head of the House GOP campaign committee, who has aired a commercial apologizing for not moving more aggressively when he was warned of Mark Foley's behavior. Beyond that, I think it's just added to a sense that the Republicans are not living up to the ideals they promised in 1994, and of course it consumed a couple of weeks of media attention during which it was hard for Hastert and company to get out their message.

Thanks for the chat, folks.

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