Critiquing the Press

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."

He was online Tuesday, May 27 at noon ET to take your questions and comments.

A transcript follows

Media Backtalk transcripts archive

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Baltimore MD: Howard: Glad you didn't take the buyout! But in reading your column about the Post's retrenchment, I was once again puzzled by something. Why did newspapers such as the Post and the NY Times rush headlong into putting their product on the Web before knowing how they could make it pay? The result has been to create a new generation of readers who won't shell out a measly 50 cents a day to buy the paper because they can get it free online. I know you have said the Web extends the Post's reach nationally, but frankly, what good does that do if the flagship product keeps losing readers and advertising? Thanks.

Howard Kurtz: Well, the truth is they had no choice. The Web is the future, and newspapers (along with networks, magazines and other Old Media folks) had to get in on the action. Among other things, the Web enables us to constantly update stories and post video, which you can't do in a once-a-day print edition.

At the same time, you are giving away your product for free (except for what revenue you can wring from banner ads). I had once thought that people would be more than happy to pay pennies a day for the privilege of reading washingtonpost.com or nytimes.com or other quality sites, but experiments with charging, even for premium content, have mostly been a flop. So newspapers like The Post remain trapped in this dilemma.

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Winnipeg, Canada: Thanks for a poignant and thought-provoking article about staff reductions at the Post. I subscribe to my local daily, although it doesn't have much to recommend it; the book section editor is literate only in the same sense as Kevin Kline's character in "A Fish Named Wanda" was literate, and the paper's political writers didn't see a logical connection between a local PM losing his post as the federal minister of justice and his facing charges for election fraud. Still, I find that I get something from the printed word that I do not get from either the radio news or the television news, which I also tune into daily.

I also feel guilty about staff reductions to your paper, because I read it only online. I started reading it in 2002 when it seemed that your country was losing its collective mind in the war of terror, and I wanted some way to tune into the national psyche. I found some truly magnificent writers, Eugene Robinson the chief among them, but many others from all points of the political spectrum. It's too bad that a model does not exist that would allow both the print and the electronic versions of a "paper" to thrive, since I truly believe that both are vital.

Howard Kurtz: No reason to feel guilty -- we are putting it out there for free. And the fact that washingtonpost.com has 9.4 million unique monthly users does enable the Web site to recoup some money from advertisers, and has made The Post a global brand as opposed to a locally sold newspaper.

The Post is still fortunate, in the sense that a staff of roughly 700 is still larger than most American newspapers. But the shrinkage, as I wrote, is painful, and some of those departing are close to irreplaceable.

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Richmond, Va.: What was the idea behind McCain giving only a few media outlets three hours to go over his records. What was he afraid of?

Howard Kurtz: Clearly he was trying to minimize coverage of his medical records, as underscored by the fact that the limited access was provided on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend.

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Ann Arbor, Mich.: You weren't tempted by the buyout offer at all? Didn't Woodward take it this time?

Howard Kurtz: When a corporation offers that much in money and benefits, you have to think about it. But I like what I do, have a lot of freedom to do it and feel considerable loyalty to The Post (even though my job includes criticizing the paper). So it wasn't a hard call for me. I've been able to do other things, such as TV and writing books, while still working here. Bob Woodward's situation is different -- he long ago became primarily an author who does not work out of the office and whose connection to The Post is more infrequent.

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Arlington, Va.: Hi, Howie. In your story on the emotional costs of The Post's buyouts, I found one name missing: Howie Kurtz. This isn't just a snide comment, but a reflection of what I find is so terribly wrong with old-fashioned dead-tree journalism. Uncurious reporters just concentrate on the bad news (those laid off) while ignoring the other key elements of the story (those who were offered, but didn't take the buyout). So why didn't Howie Kurtz take the buyout? Did those who decided to stay have faith in the future stability and financial success of The Washington Post, or were there some other reasons? As a 40-year Washington Post reader, I'm not asking for a "good news" story, just a couple of paragraphs that would give relief from breathless hype and unrelenting misery deposited on my doorstep each day: i.e. balance.

Howard Kurtz: I thought I had explained my reasoning. I'm an ink-in-the-veins newspaper guy, I believe in newspapers and in The Washington Post. That doesn't mean that those who took the offer don't believe in the paper. Some were closer to retirement age than I am. Others want to move on to a different phase of their lives -- in academia, perhaps. Maybe others could not turn down the money because of their family situations. I don't blame anyone for accepting a very generous offer that may not come around again. I just made a different call for myself. And the torrent of e-mail I've gotten has persuaded me that there are people out there who want to keep reading what I write.

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Shelton, Wash.: Okay, I am probably showing my profound ignorance of what newspaper readers actually read, but surely there is a way to save money without cutting the news division? The A section (minus the op-ed pieces) is essential for its investigative reporting. Metro (minus the columnists) is essential for people in Washington for the same reason. But the world would be a better place if someone put a match to the editorial pages of The Post, the Sports section simply cannot compete with the blogs for local teams -- contrast the high quality analytical baseball blogs with the Post's coverage -- and Sports Illustrated and ESPN for national sports news, and the Style section is just froth. So if the Post is going to make cuts, why not cut those sections?

Howard Kurtz: I think a lot of people buy newspapers for the sportswriters. That would be a sure-fire way of losing plenty of readers. One of the great things about newspapers is that they are a smorgasbord. One person might passionately want to read the likes of Michael Wilbon and Tom Boswell, another might pay no attention to sports but care deeply about reports from foreign correspondents, and a third might be totally focused on arts and entertainment. We get flooded with complaints when we cut a single comic strip. So it's safe to assume that everything in the paper has a constituency.

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Journalism and Objective Reality: From a media-process standpoint, if you ask a newspaper reporter why they don't say X (where "X" disproves some political lie or falsehood), they'll point you to an article saying X from two months ago. But that article has been forgotten. My question is why reporters don't remind voters of X every time candidates say not-X. Testing politician's statements against objective reality should not be an occasional feature, should it?

Howard Kurtz: It all depends on the X.

The Post does have a regular Fact-Checker column, by the way.

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Jewish Voters and the Media: My prediction: Hundreds (if not thousands) of articles will be written between now and November about how Jewish voters have a problem with Obama, and then they will go to the polls and overwhelmingly vote for him. Despite this, no articles will be written about how Jewish voters have a problem with McCain. How come?

Howard Kurtz: Jewish voters traditionally have leaned Democratic, so if Obama is below the level of support of past Democratic nominees, it's fair to report on that. If polls showed that McCain was drawing a smaller proportion of Jewish voters than Bush did, that would also be a story.

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Europe: Will Richard Quest be on the air again at CNN? Also, I only read the online version of The Post. I live overseas and The Post is not to be found here. (Unfortunately.) However, some family members now live in Washington and from my sending them various articles from the Web site, they are now Post subscribers because they found they liked the paper so much. And if I lived in the D.C. area, I would subscribe to the dead-tree version!

Howard Kurtz: Thanks for spreading the word. I don't know about the fate of Richard Quest in the wake of his arrest.

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Washington: Re: "the Web is the future." I wonder if that is really true Howard? After all, back in the tech boom, there were dozens and dozens of dozens of companies that went into retailing online and found it a graveyard. (Pets.com, anyone?) My belief is that newspapers jumped on the Web train without thinking what they were really doing. If The Post pulled down its site tomorrow and became print only again, I am betting that newsstand sales and subscriptions would increase. The only thing missing would be a venue for thousands of splenetic individuals to post outraged comments about op-ed pieces.

Howard Kurtz: Specific Web sites might thrive or collapse at any given time, but I think it's beyond debate that the future of news is online. Not exclusively -- the Internet hasn't done away with television, and television didn't do away with radio -- but significantly. If The Post took down its Web site tomorrow, it might boost circulation slightly in the Washington-Maryland-Virginia area. But since 85 percent of the 9.4 million online readers live outside the area and can't physically buy the paper, it makes no sense to cut off their access to Post journalism while we all try to figure out how to make money on the Web.

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College Park, Md.: Thanks, Howie, for not taking the buyout. I'd like your opinion about one criticism of dead-tree newspapers: the articles are too long. My hunch is that it's not really the length of individual articles that's excessive and off-putting to younglings. Rather, it's huge amount of text in any day's newspaper. People don't have time in a day to read both the news in A1 and any of The Post's mammoth investigative pieces.

Howard Kurtz: I think that's a factor -- maybe a guilt factor -- in some people's perception of the paper, which is why there's a perpetual push for shorter articles. I do think it's a problem if all the articles are longer than they need to be, which is another way of saying they don't hold people's interest. But I've never quite understood why it's a problem if some investigative and in-depth front-page stories are long. If folks aren't interested, just skip 'em! Sometimes narrative journalism requires the space to breathe.

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Reston, Va.: Howard: From Sunday's Post, from Anne Kornblut and Dan Balz who should know better: "Trailing in delegates while her debt continues to grow, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is aggressively campaigning in the final three contests of the primary season in the hope of seizing a victory in the overall popular vote from Sen. Barack Obama.

The effect of such a victory -- and the question of whether Clinton hopes to leverage it into the No. 2 spot on the Democratic ticket or simply leave it as a historical marker -- is less clear."

This is ridiculous. There is no such thing as a "popular vote victory." Four states never tabulated an official popular vote count because they held caucuses, Obama wasn't on the ballot in Michigan in accordance with party wishes so he has no popular vote total there, and none of the candidates campaigned in Florida so that total is suspect. There are other caucus states where voter turnout is obviously much lower than primary states, so there's no way to accurately weigh the results of a caucus state with a primary state.

This is all a bogus argument raised by the Clinton campaign in a desperate bid to stay in the race and whenever reporters like your colleagues at The Post play up the popular vote story without explaining its worthlessness, what are they doing other than helping the Clinton campaign?

Howard Kurtz: I think the paper has explained it numerous times. And while the popular vote is, in and of itself, meaningless, it would be a potent talking point for Hillary Clinton if she could claim to have won more Democratic votes than Barack Obama. The problem for now is that her argument rests on Florida and Michigan (Obama wasn't even on the ballot in the latter state), the caucus contests and so on.

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Kensington, Md.: Howie, I'm glad you're staying, but some of those names on the buyout list were just brutal to read about, Tom Ricks and Robin Wright in particular. How on Earth do you replace that combination of experience and insight? Ricks may be the best Pentagon correspondent in history, and I'm old enough to remember giants like George Wilson and Hanson Baldwin when I say that.

Seems to me that the Internet is proving to be like Homer Simpson's alcohol: The cause of, and the solution to all our problems. But it seems that newspapers are suffering from a deadly combination of cheapskates and ideologues who only want read that which they agree with, and who trash everything else. I've criticized The Post millions of times in my long life, but as far as I'm concerned, anyone in the D.C. area who refuses to shell out for the print edition is little more than what us poolroom bums call a mooch.

Howard Kurtz: There are many more names on that list that I didn't get in--science reporter extraordinaire Rick Weiss, tough-guy, Pulitzer-winning film critic Stephen Hunter, longtime political editor Maralee Schwartz and many others.

The Internet is only part of the problem. Revenue and circulation are declining in part because people have a million choices about how to spend their time. People often tell pollsters they don't have "time" to read a newspaper, which is another way of saying it's not compelling or valuable enough to make a priority. I think some of these wounds are self-inflicted. During the 1980s and 1990s, when the picture was brighter, too many papers avoided controversy, delivered a bland product, and lost touch with their readers. We're now paying the price for that.

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Santa Cruz, Calif.: I'm curious about your comment that experiments with charging for online access to news(papers?) hasn't worked. I would certainly pay, say, $50 a year for access to washingtonpost.com. The only experiment I'm aware of is the New York Times one, where one would pay to get access to certain columns. That was dumb -- especially since I could read columns like Tom Friedman's syndicated the next day in my local paper! What other experiments in charging are you aware of?

Howard Kurtz: Slate and Salon both have gone through periods of charging for access and suffered as a result. Time magazine also went through a period of putting much of its content behind a wall. The only general news site that has successfully charged for subscriptions is the Wall Street Journal, and it obviously has an unusually affluent audience.

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Chicago: I disagree with Washington about the future of online newspapers. Here in Chicago I can only read The Post online. And I also read four or five other newspapers every day online, including the Times and the Tribunes (both Los Angeles and Chicago). If The Post -- or any of those papers -- went dead tree-only tomorrow, I wouldn't start subscribing to the paper version, I'd just stop reading that outlet and spend more time on other sites. Printed newspapers are nice to read on the plane or something, but on a day to day basis they're obsolete because they're almost always out of date. Plus they're a huge waste of paper.

I agree, the only trick now is figuring out how to make the most money off the Web version, because that's where the readership will be.

Howard Kurtz: I wouldn't say print editions are "obsolete" -- they still contain news columnists, sports columnists, TV and movie reviews, health stories, investigative pieces and profiles that you can't get anywhere else. But overall I agree with you. Why jettison the one part of our business that is growing?

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Why not a subscription model?: I'd bet that of the 9 million online readers, a healthy percentage of us would pay a little, say a buck per month, to read the Post.

If, say, a third did, that's $36 million a year gross for a product with no physical costs like paper, ink, or delivery. Not a bad business.

Howard Kurtz: The question is, what percentage? And I don't think The Post wants to take the gamble of finding out what that figure is. Plus, let's be optimistic and say that one-third of the current online readers would subscribe. That would mean kissing 6 million readers goodbye, which would make the Web site far less attractive to advertisers.

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San Francisco: So, what, no Media Notes today?

Howard Kurtz: I was off yesterday. National holiday and all that.

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"Breaking News": Howard, do you think the term "breaking news" is overused in the media? I find it is over used when news is either not breaking, broke several hours ago with no new developments, the story is not such a big thing that it deserves a breaking status. Your thoughts?

Howard Kurtz: It's way overused on cable TV. It's a way of making you look up and say, something must be happening here! I dare not change the channel!

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Columbia, Md.: A previous questioner suggested dumping the entire editorial page as a way to cut costs.

I love reading the Washington Post news articles and do enjoy the sports columnists as well. But I made a decision long ago that I could not in good conscience give money to a newspaper that includes a liberal editorial page (I think I read that The Post has not endorsed a Republican for President since the 1950s and my guess is the endorsement of Obama is already written) and will not pay for a Washington Post. So instead, I pay for the other newspaper in town for a hard copy and read the Washington Post online for free.

With the explosion of online opinion blogs, hasn't the concept of and reason for an editorial page in a newspaper disappeared in this day and age? I say dump the editorial page and give more money to reporters to report the news....

Howard Kurtz: First of all, I read lots of newspapers whose editorial pages I disagree with. I don't quite understand the moral imperative of refusing to subscribe as a result. But beyond that, the costs of maintaining editorial and op-ed pages are just not that great. The staffs are relatively small. Major expenses for The Post include not just personnel but the costs of maintaining foreign and domestic bureaus, of covering Iraq, of constantly traveling with the presidential candidates.

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Hartford, Conn.: My thought always has been that the pajama-wearing bloggers only pull off what they do because of massive fact-gathering (among other things) operations like The Post. With even The Post scaling back, the readers eventually will be left with only opinion -- and ideology-driven commentary and left on their own to sort it out. By that time, it will be too late to reverse course.

Howard Kurtz: I love bloggers, but I have often wondered what they would have to argue about if the mainstream media disappeared.

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Silver Spring, Md.: How did you feel about Eugene Robinson making a big deal about Hillary's RFK comment after your friends at the Politico and at Slate explained its insignificance?

You mentioned the success of Politico in your column. I find their "politics as sports" coverage banal and rebarbative. What hope can there be when the top people in the country don't appreciate the difference between war and football?

Howard Kurtz: Gene is an opinion columnist. He's paid for his views. Whether what Hillary said about RFK is important or not -- and my feeling is it was way overplayed -- is not a cut-and-dried fact. So it's hardly surprising that people who write for Slate, Politico, The Post and a thousand other places have different takes and make different arguments. I like having that kind of journalistic diversity.

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Portland, Ore.: Howard, do you feel the apology from the Fox news reporter/anchor, whatever she is, is sufficient? It is so outrageous on so many levels -- first, to continue the Osama/Obama mix-up; second to blatantly admit that they (the network) are anti-Obama by suggesting taking them both (Osama and Obama) out is desirable; thirdly to gleefully suggest the assassination of a Presidential candidate. Is FOX just so beyond the pale so much of the time that people simply don't get outraged any more?

Howard Kurtz: Liz Trotta is a Fox News contributor and former Washington Times staffer. Her joke, if that's what it was, was in spectacularly bad taste. I'll leave it to viewers to judge whether her apology was adequate.

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Arlington, Va.: Mr. Kurtz, thank you for your article on the Post's buyouts. It's good some people there realize the news is moving digital. The Post has adapted better than any other daily newspaper. The question is whether there is an economic model that will allow investigative reporting to continue. I think the Post will survive because of it's national focus. But do you think that smaller cities and towns will be the ones truly hurt in the new media age because their papers wont be able to do local investigative reporting?

Howard Kurtz: It depends on how good their Web sites are. The one thing that newspapers in Orlando and Kansas City and Phoenix and Philly and hundreds of other cities can offer, in print and online, is in-depth reporting on local issues. Local television stations, with their much smaller staffs, don't really provide much competition in this arena. So there's no reason that the local paper (in most cases a monopoly) shouldn't be able to dominate the online market for local news.

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Baltimore: Howard, I was very disappointed with the panel you assembled Sunday to discuss Hillary's candidacy. All three women dismissed as ridiculous your question whether Hillary's gender might also be a benefit to her. Surveys have shown consistently that to many women, Hillary's gender is a primary qualification. Someone should have been there to question the ridiculous response from Carol Costello et al.

Howard Kurtz: I disagreed with that assessment. Of course Hillary's gender is an advantage to her in many ways, as well as a disadvantage.

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New York: Wasn't McCain's "release" of his medical records rather bizarre? In fact, he's not "releasing" them at all. Like some kind of supermarket game show where you get 5 minutes to stuff as many groceries in your basket before the time runs out, McCain gave a select group of reporters only 3 hours to peruse through what are probably hundreds of pages of documents, then when the buzzer rings, it's over, no more documents. What does McCain think this is, some kind of game? Even the most experienced reporter isn't entirely equipped to make judgments on medical reports based on three hours of browsing through records without discussing them with doctors or experts, are they?

Howard Kurtz: Well, McCain did make one of his doctors available. Fortunately for him it was a one-day story because he appears to be in good health. The campaign also gave access to the records first to the AP, hoping for a positive story that would set the tone for everyone else in the media.

Thanks for the chat, folks. I plan to keep doing them.

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