Venerated media columnist Howard Kurtz has thrown himself headlong into the biggest elite-newspaper squabble of the year thus far. (Okay, so we're only two weeks in. Still true.) In his column today, Kurtz tackles the disgusted report from the Times' Helene Cooper that a throng of what may have been Post reporters cheered Obama's arrival at their office. "There was no standing ovation," he writes. The paper's "grizzled journalistic veterans ... stood and, well, stared," save for the shriek of a lowly "clerical employee." But Kurtz steps it up a notch, too, throwing Cooper's sass back at her and then some. Referring to Cooper's description of the "soviet-style" Post building, Kurtz responds, "All right, it's no architectural prize, but at least we haven't had to mortgage our headquarters like a certain Manhattan-based newspaper." Snap! Someone has to stop this rivalry before it escalates into a back-alley brawl, or, considering the participants, a back-alley subtle-belittlement free-for-all.
Honestly, there's only one thing I can say: This. Is. Out-standing.
The best part is that the insults have all the subtle restraint of largely-inked initials on the wall of a high school bathroom. A "certain Manhattan-based newspaper," Kurtz? You're not even trying to be nice anymore, and I LOVE IT, QUITE FRANKLY. And that ghost of a comparison tying the Post headquarters to a gulag? THAT is the stuff hyper-reactive, over-educated dreams are made of. Who came up with that? I want to be their BFF.
The only way--and I mean the ONLY way--this could get better is if the entire Times staff started communicating only in finger snaps and jive talk.
Yes. That would be the only way.
The Times vs. Washington Post Spat Gets Cattier (Daily Intel)
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