Howie Kurtz:

There was a time when even Kurtz realized that accepting salaried employment from another media conglomerate was inappropriate for the press reporter of the Washington Post. Back in 1998—just before he became the host of CNN’s Reliable Sources—Kurtz moonlighted (once) for ABC’s Nightline, to do a profile of Matt Drudge. When veteran journalist Doug Ireland called Kurtz to challenge him about this apparent conflict—working for ABC when he also had to write about the network—Kurtz conceded it was a “legitimate question.”

“In his defense,” Ireland wrote, “Kurtz told me that his Nightline gig had been approved by Post managing editor Robert Kaiser and that, since it was ‘not a continuing relationship’ with ABC but a ‘one-time assignment,’ conflict of interest was ‘not a problem.’”

That seems fairly reasonable (full disclosure: Robert Kaiser is also my brother), but later that same year the Post approved exactly the kind of continuing relationship that Kurtz had told Ireland should have been out of bounds—when Kurtz became the host of Reliable Sources.

Of course, Kurtz was not only being paid by CNN—he was being paid by CNN’s parent, Time Warner, which also publishes Time, Fortune, Money, and Sports Illustrated, among many other magazines, all of which are also part of Kurtz’s beat.

Over the years, Post executive editor Len Downie has offered a variety of flimsy excuses for this odd arrangement. When Kurtz first embarked on his dual employment, the Post’s defense was “transparency”—whenever Kurtz wrote about CNN, his editors promised, a tagline would identify him as the host of Reliable Sources. But then Mickey Kaus did a Nexis search of Kurtz’s stories and quickly turned up five examples of Kurtz’s articles about CNN under which no such disclaimer appeared. And no warning ever appears when Kurtz writes about any other Time Warner properties.

Over the years, Post executive editor Len Downie has offered a variety of flimsy excuses for this odd arrangement. When Kurtz first embarked on his dual employment, the Post’s defense was “transparency”—whenever Kurtz wrote about CNN, his editors promised, a tagline would identify him as the host of Reliable Sources. But then Mickey Kaus did a Nexis search of Kurtz’s stories and quickly turned up five examples of Kurtz’s articles about CNN under which no such disclaimer appeared. And no warning ever appears when Kurtz writes about any other Time Warner properties.

A few years later, Downie explained to Washingtonian magazine that since Kurtz already had a conflict of interest, because his beat included writing about his own newspaper, there was no reason not to expand that conflict exponentially by making it include the whole Time Warner empire. “You’re going to have to cover someone who pays you,” Downie explained. “Howie has demonstrated in the way that he covers this newspaper that he has no conflict covering an employer. … When we agreed to let him go work for CNN, I expected that he’d be able to treat that employer as a reporter in the same way that he treats the Washington Post—and he has.”