Media

Howard Kurtz chastises Globe's 'sleight of hand'

by Dan Kennedy

The Boston Globe's "Names & Faces" column last Friday, November 5, featured a juicy item on Abe Rosenthal, the former New York Times executive editor who had just lost his op-ed-page column. In what appeared to be an exclusive interview with the Globe, Rosenthal said he considered himself to have been fired: " `Sweetheart, you can use any word you want,' Rosenthal said yesterday from Manhattan, where he was cleaning out his office after writing a final column for today's Times."

Trouble is, the entire 200-word Rosenthal item had been lifted, virtually word for word, from Howard Kurtz's media column in that day's Washington Post. Nowhere was it made clear that the scooplet did not originate with the Globe.

Mary Jane Wilkinson, the Globe's deputy managing editor for features, admits that her paper violated its own policy. According to Wilkinson, the "Names & Faces" columnists, Carol Beggy and Beth Carney, wrote an innocuous item on Rosenthal's departure without having seen Kurtz's column. That item ran in the Globe's early editions.

Then, on Thursday night, long after Beggy and Carney had left for the day, Kurtz's column came in over the wires. At that point, Wilkinson says, the editors discussed what they should do with Kurtz's exclusive -- and they decided to run with it. But the copy editor to whom the task was assigned neglected to insert a credit either to the Post or to Kurtz. Granted, there's a caveat emptor at the end of every "Names & Faces" ("Material from wire services and other sources was used in this column"), but what the Globe did was deceptive and unfair, if inadvertent.

"Yes, there should have been a credit, and it was unintentional that it was left off," says Wilkinson. "The person who was responsible for doing that is feeling very bad."

Kurtz originally described the lift as "a piece of thievery." But upon learning of Wilkinson's explanation, he softened his remarks -- slightly.

"I understand as well as anyone the late-night screw-ups that happen at newspapers. But in this day and age, every staffer should know that it's not kosher to rip off someone else's reporting without a shred of credit," says Kurtz.

"I'm not excusing this bit of journalistic sleight of hand, because it recycled just about every quote and factoid in my article," Kurtz adds. "But because it happened under deadline pressure at night, it seems more of a misdemeanor than a daytime felony committed with malice aforethought."

Then, too, the Globe violated the first rule of gossip reporting, which is to stick in a boldfaced reference to every celebrity even remotely connected with an item. Certainly Kurtz -- an author, bigfoot freelancer, CNN star, and all-purpose talking head -- fits the bill.