On Sunday, Howard Kurtz apologized to
Jason Collins, saying that he was wrong to criticize the NBA free
agent.
Collins last week came out gay in a
cover story for Sports Illustrated.
In a Daily Beast column titled
Jason Collins' Other Secret, Kurtz claimed that Collins had
failed to disclose that he was once engaged to a woman, Carolyn Moss.
A later version of the story stated that Collins had “downplayed”
the subject.
(Related: Carolyn
Moos, Jason Collins' ex-fiancee: I invested 8 years.)
Within hours, Newsweek/Daily Beast
Editor in Chief Tina Brown announced that Kurtz was no longer
employed at the Daily Beast.
In a Reliable Sources segment,
Kurtz, the host of the CNN program which takes a critical look at the
news media, explained what had happened.
“On Monday, I read the Sports
Illustrated article by Jason Collins, the first pro male team
athlete to come out publicly as gay,” Kurtz told his viewers. “I
read it too fast and carelessly missed that Jason Collins said he was
engaged previously to a woman and then wrote and commented that he
was wrong to keep that from readers when in fact I was the one who
was wrong.”
“My logic about what happened between
Jason Collins and his former fiancee and what was or wasn't disclosed
in hindsight, well I was even wrong to raise that. And it showed a
lack of sensitivity to the issue. Also, I didn't give him a chance
to respond to my account before I wrote it. And, in addition, my
first correction to the story was not as complete and as full as it
should have been.”
“In a video where I discuss the
issue, I wrongly jokingly referred to something that shouldn't have
been joked about.”
“For all those reasons, I apologize
to readers, to viewers, most importantly to Jason Collins and to his
ex-fiancee,” Kurtz said. (The video is embedded on this page.
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