Kurtz profiles Krugman; ignores elephant in room

[babylonsister]

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201009270011

Kurtz profiles Krugman; ignores elephant in room

September 27, 2010 12:04 pm ET by Jamison Foser


Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz profiles New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, but manages to overlook what should probably be the central focus of such a profile: Why haven’t Krugman’s views, particularly on economic issues, been reflected more in major media coverage of public policy debates?

Krugman is, after all, a New York Times columnist, bestselling author, Princeton professor, and Nobel Prize winner in economics. And, as Kurtz notes, Krugman has not been bashful about criticizing the Obama administration. And yet Krugman’s view that, for example, last year’s economic stimulus package was far too small was largely ignored by the news media.

A hint of this shows up in Kurtz’s profile -- but only a hint:

”I felt like a really lonely voice," says Paul Krugman, an unknotted blue tie draped around his neck. "It's been really frustrating." But he keeps hammering away, demanding action in one New York Times column after another, hoping "to establish a counter-narrative against what everyone else is saying."

The 57-year-old commentator feels vindicated after predicting that the economy would skid into the gutter unless the president pushed through a far bigger stimulus package.

Unfortunately, Kurtz doesn’t attempt to assess why Krugman is a “lonely voice” -- or what it says about the news media that the views of this Nobel-winning economist/New York Times columnist (and the many other economists who agree with him) are largely absent from coverage of public policy debates.

[COLGATE4]

1. Gee, I don't know - could it be that the NYTimes ( as well as

the rest of the corporate media) is in the tank to ignore people like Krugman?

[Supersedeas]

2. Kurtz is part of the cocktail hour news coverage in the country--it's not facts, it's acquaintances

and personalities that matter.

[Doctor_J]

3. Kurtz's wife is a professional right-winger

and he himself gets paid by the same people who pay Wolf Blitzer, Campbell Senior, Tom Friedman, Juan Williams, charles Krauthammer, George Will, Erick Erickson, and Robert Samuelson. He's a liar and a partisan hack.

[Spazito]

4. Yep, his wife is a repub and runs a 'consulting firm'...

Sheri Annis is a media consultant and political commentator whose clients range from California to Washington DC. She was the spokeswoman for Arnold Schwarzenegger during his first political campaign. She was chief spokeswoman for California's Proposition 227, the successful measure to eliminate California's failed bilingual education programs. In addition, she played a major role in California's Proposition 209 campaign, which eliminated race and gender-based preferences in government hiring, contracting and education. Her early career began in the California think tank world.

Prop 209 was, in essence, against affirmative action, that was it's purpose. Prop 227 did away with bilingual education programs.

She is a real piece of work and Howard, imo, does all he can to prop up her repub clients albeit somewhat obliquely.

Ms. Annis' biography link:

http://www.fourthestatestrategies.com/html/biography.html

[Doctor_J]

5. Strange that ConNN never mentions this when advertizing Howie's programs

"...hosted by Howard Kurtz, husband of right-wing quote-unquote media consultant Sheri Annis".

[Spazito]

6. CNN never made clear her connection to Howie even when she would...

appear on it nor her connection to the repubs, they would tout her as a 'political analyst' as if she was 'neutral'. I think her connections to Howie and the repubs became public and CNN had to acknowledge it but that was years ago if my memory serves me correctly.

It seems it was as late as 2008 from this NYT article:

CNN Reporter’s Interview Raises Ethical Questions (dated May 29, 2008)

When Howard Kurtz invited Kimberly Dozier, the CBS journalist wounded in Iraq, onto his program, “Reliable Sources,” on CNN on Sunday, he was not a disinterested interviewer. Mr. Kurtz’s wife, Sheri Annis, had been paid to serve as a publicist for Ms. Dozier’s memoir, “Breathing the Fire,” which Ms. Dozier had come on the program to discuss.

After the interview, in which he also read aloud from the book, Mr. Kurtz told his viewers that he considered Ms. Dozier “a remarkable woman.” He then added, “I should mention that my wife has done some promotion work for Kim Dozier’s book.”

The interview represented another complicated tangle in the complex world of Mr. Kurtz. He is paid by two of the nation’s largest media entities — The Washington Post Company, which employs him as a media reporter, and Time Warner, which owns CNN — to cover the doings at their news organizations, and those at their competitors’. But several media ethicists interviewed in recent days said that, given the financial arrangement between Ms. Dozier’s publisher, Meredith Books, and Ms. Annis, Mr. Kurtz should not have done this particular interview at all. (Ms. Annis said she was actually paid by a subcontractor hired by Meredith.)

“CNN has a lot of great journalists there,” said Thomas Huang, an ethics and diversity fellow at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center, who is on leave as an assistant managing editor at The Dallas Morning News. “Why have Howard Kurtz do it, given his indirect relationship with Kim Dozier through his wife?”

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=post&forum=433&topic_id=456674&mesg_id=457241