Subject: On the Media Beat 
Date: Published: 5/6/93 (99 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    LEISURE & ARTS -- Bookshelf:
    On the Media Beat
    ----
    By Joe Queenan

    From 1982 until 1985, Howard Kurtz covered the Department of
 Housing and Urban Development for the Washington Post.  Nobody cared.
 Years later, still miffed at his colleagues in the media for
 ignoring the scandals he helped expose at that laughable agency, Mr. 
 Kurtz landed a job as the Post's media reporter.  Here he gets to
 spend all his time deploring the terrible job his colleagues in the
 media have done covering the S&L scandal, AIDS, the Los Angeles
 riots, Donald Trump, Operation Desert Storm, everything.
    Now, having written hundreds of articles deploring the terrible
 job his colleagues in the media are doing covering everything, he
 has repackaged them into a book deploring the same.  This is not what
 Ben Franklin had in mind.
    Media reporters, the journalistic equivalent of police
 internal-affairs departments, force journalists to be on the
 receiving end of unfriendly questions for a change.  But they're a
 pretty motley crew, fusing the skills of the Monday-morning
 quarterback with those of the snitch and the parasite.  Given the
 leisure to sit back on Friday and explain why a deadline reporter
 failed to get the story on Monday, they are not merely holier than
 thou; they are holier than everybody.  Howard Kurtz is nothing if not
 holy.
    The task Mr. Kurtz has set himself in "Media Circus:  The Trouble
 With America's Newspapers" (Times Books, 420 pages, $25) is to
 identify a number of important stories that the press has mishandled
 in the past decade, and then explain why.  But in the very first
 chapter, Mr. Kurtz muffs the assignment when he excoriates the press
 for lavishing its attention on Mr. Trump throughout the '80s.  This
 is the same Mr. Kurtz who just three pages earlier attacks the press
 for being "boring," "remote" and cut off from the interests of the
 ordinary reader.  Having first savaged serious newspapers for being
 dishwater dull, he then attacks not-so-serious tabloids for giving
 bigger play to Mr. Trump's latest romantic fling than to Nelson
 Mandela's release from prison.  (Earth to Howard:  We're trying to
 sell a few newspapers here.)  
    More to the point, this is a ridiculous mixture of apples and
 oranges; tabloids are supposed to cover Donald and Marla; Mr. 
 Mandela's release is supposed to be reported by the grown-up
 newspapers like the New York Times.  Tabloids are tabloids; nobody
 reads them for the dance reviews.
    Mr. Kurtz is equally adrift when he criticizes the media for
 failing to cover the dismissal of a financial analyst at Janney
 Montgomery Scott Inc. who dared to question the health of Mr. 
 Trump's empire.  Here we have two problems:  inaccuracy and silliness.
 Mr. Kurtz is flat-out wrong when he claims that the press ignored
 the firing; it was given continuous play in the Times and in this
 paper.  Mr. Kurtz actually seems to believe that the general press --
 including tabloids -- should have dumped Donald and Marla from their
 covers to write about the firing of an analyst from a company none
 of them had ever heard of.
    Incoherence and inconsistency permeate the book.  On the one hand,
 he wants white journalists to be more aggressive in writing about
 race relations.  On the other hand, he describes what happens to
 white journalists who deviate from the party line about race or sex
 -- and seems to go along with their chastisement.  In the very same
 chapter in which he describes the Rev. Al Sharpton as a liar and a
 government stoolie, he applauds his perspicacious take on the L. A. 
 riots.  Having first attacked his colleagues for the "tabloidization"
 of the industry, he then admits that he begged his editors at the
 Post to let him write a story about how the press was covering Bill
 Clinton's alleged extramarital affairs.
    Nor does he ever explain why it is sleazy for the press to report
 on people who do sleazy things, particularly when they're seeking
 the highest office in the land.  Who told Gary Hart to take up with
 Donna Rice?  Did someone at the Cleveland Plain Dealer hold a gun to
 Mr. Clinton's head and force him to befriend Gennifer Flowers?
    The failings of "Media Circus" stem from Mr. Kurtz's utopian
 conception of the newspaper business.  He has a PBS vision of
 journalism in which every paper will cover HUD and run endless
 profiles of advertising execs who retire to the Aran Islands -- and
 no one will write about Amy Fisher.  He fails to recognize that
 newspapers are a reflection of society's values, and that, given a
 choice between reading about the plight of the hapless Tamils and
 the plight of the hapless Mary Jo Buttafuoco, the public will choose
 her most of the time.  Good investigative journalism is medicine, but
 if you only give people medicine, they will eventually stop buying
 your newspaper.
    Does "Media Circus" have any redeeming features?  Yes, as a
 catalog of media screw-ups the book has some archival value.  The
 national press really did blow the S&L story (though the local press
 did not), just as we may be blowing the boom-in-mutual-funds story
 right now.  Mr. Kurtz should also be commended for repackaging the
 Post story in which he drew attention to the fact that National
 Public Radio's horrid self-promoter Nina Totenberg was a plagiarist.
    As a journalist, Mr. Kurtz's heart is probably in the right
 place.  It's just that his brain sometimes goes AWOL. 

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