But Good Enough For Fox News!

Howard Kurtz, those with long memories will know, had sweet sinecures with both CNN and the Daily Beast (bureau chief!) for reasons that are not easily explicable but were surely bad. He was fired from both in part because of his disgraceful smear of Jason Collins, and in part because he was spending inordinate amounts of time at the platform afforded by his other two jobs to plug an obscure, terrible, and now defunct website. It could safely be inferred that his love for the “Daily Download” was motivated by another conflict of interest, which he denied. You will be highly unsurprised to learn that Occam’s Razor had this right:

Kurtz and Ashburn’s relationship centered on The Daily Download, a puzzling tech website owned by Ashburn (and funded by The Knight Foundation) that culminated, in May 2013, with a video of Kurtz and Ashburn smearing NBA player Jason Collins for coming out as gay. Kurtz was later fired from The Daily Beast and abruptly departed CNN after denying any substantial involvement with the Daily Download.

Yet in a grant proposal submitted by Maryland Public Television to the Knight Foundation on December 10, 2010, Kurtz is listed, along with Ashburn, as a salaried “co-host” of the Daily Download’s 60-second “digital reviews,” which aired on public television, and a “daily blogger” at the Download’s website. One year after that submission, Knight awarded Maryland Public Television $230,000, the majority of which went to Ashburn’s own media company, which helped pay for Kurtz’s extracurricular position.

[…]

The initial proposal’s budget allocated $100,000 each for two Daily Download “hosts,” who in an accompanying “budget narrative” are specifically identified as Kurtz and Ashburn. The same section indicates the pair planned to donate an unspecified portion of their salaries back to Maryland Public Television. (Earlier in the proposal, Kurtz’s donation is described as an in-kind contribution worth $50,000; Ashburn’s donation is not detailed.)

However, a revised budget submitted by Ashburn on November 16, 2011—a year later, and one week after Knight accepted the proposal—indicates that one “host/executive editor” would receive $160,000, and that the other “host” would receive $135,000—a significant increase in each case. (How or whether Kurtz’s “donation” still factored into his compensation is left unspecified.)

There is little doubt that the “hosts” are Kurtz and Ashburn. Throughout these internal documents and in the Knight Foundation’s March 2012 press release, they are the only individuals ever designated as hosts of the Daily Download.

Nice work if you can etc.

At least he’s found a home at Fox News, where he can do some real reporting, like scrolling through Facebook photo galleries for cleavage.