Howard Kurtz Takes Shots At Suffering I-man

Of all the places for Washington Post Media Critic Howard Kurtz to spend an afternoon, the Playboy Mansion would be about as likely a guess as, say, Osama Bin Laden’s cave in Afghanistan. But there Kurtz was last week, interviewing 84-year old Hugh Hefner for CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

“He’s very old, he’s got a young girlfriend, and he uses Viagra,” said Kurtz. “I was thinking, who does he remind me of?”

Having taken a shot at a man battling two maladies this morning—cancer and a cold—Kurtz further reported that Hefner, who helped start the sexual revolution with the publication of Playboy Magazine, thinks there is too much explicit pornography available on the Internet. 

“He acknowledges that Playboy, in many ways…has become passé in a world that is kind of awash in sexual images,” said Kurtz.

Though the debate over building a mosque near Ground Zero has nothing to do with sex, it’s the sort of issue that is pornographic for the news media, and last week President Obama, who had remained quiet on the topic for months, finally caved and threw his support behind the Muslim community. The next day, he waffled, claiming he never endorsed building the mosque two blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood.

“So he manages to tick off both sides,” said Kurtz, who, in today’s Washington Post, wrote about the history of this dispute, which the New York Times first wrote about last fall. “Nobody uttered a peep, there was no reaction.”

A few months later the New York Post and others picked up on it, and ignited the story into a national media centerpiece. “This great expenditure of national energy over this—it’s basically a battle over symbolism,” said Kurtz. “It’s either going to be built or it’s not going to be built.”

He supposed the media’s fixation on the issue is not entirely unrelated to the fact that it’s August, and everybody is sick of the Jet Blue guy. Imus, however, was quick to note the profound emotional effect that building this mosque would have on the families and loved ones of 9/11 victims.

“The location does seem to be a provocation to those who understandably still feel the emotions are raw,” said Kurtz, who then wondered, “Would it be okay ten blocks away? In midtown Manhattan?”

As for Obama, he’s had a rough few months no matter how you slice it, and Kurtz owed some of this negativity to the fact that being President is difficult, and that Washington is deadlocked.

Imus’s take was predictably diplomatic. “I don’t like anybody,” he told Kurtz. “And now I don’t like you because you were mean to me.”

-Julie Kanfer