The New York Observer, which is owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, is “re-visiting” its policy on covering Trump’s presidential campaign in the wake of the revelation that its editor in chief provided “input” for Trump’s speech to AIPAC last month.
But the paper made no mention of any role played by Observer editor Ken Kurson. That came out Sunday in a long New York Magazine article, which reported in passing that Kushner wrote the speech “with input from Observer editor Ken Kurson.”
Kurson, a former adviser to 2008 Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, told the Huffington Post that he read a draft of the speech but as HuffPost media writer Michael Calderone wrote, “did not specifically address a question about whether he wrote or edited any of the speech.”
In an email to Calderone, Kurson said: “‘Input: I looked at a draft. Jared [Kushner] and I have been discussing politics since 2004 ….It’s not unusual for an editor to talk politics with his publisher. What’s unusual is that a publisher’s father-in-law runs for president.'”
“‘It’s a complicated world and I don’t intend to let the eleven people who have appointed themselves the journalist police tell me, at age 47, how to behave or to whom I’m allowed to speak,'” he said in the email. It wasn’t clear which eleven people Kurson had in mind. He had not responded to an email request for comment late Monday from The Washington Post.
Full statement from NY Observer’s @Jill_Jorgensen on Trump coverage: https://t.co/7UAmm5QTtO pic.twitter.com/D6x7mT8pL3
— Michael Calderone (@mlcalderone) April 4, 2016
In any case, on Monday, Observer senior politics editor Jillian Jorgensen tweeted a statement to Calderone: