Howard Kurtz

Howard Kurtz is the host of Media Buzz on FOX News, where he examines the bias and shortcomings of the news business. Kurtz scrutinizes the media’s fairness and objectivity by questioning journalists of top news organizations, including those at FOX News, on subjects ranging from politics to technology, business, culture, and sports. He appears frequently on such programs as the O’Reilly Factor and Special Report. Before joining FOX News, for 15 years, he served as the host of the weekly CNN program Reliable Sources.

Covering the media since 1990, Kurtz has served as Washington bureau chief of Newsweek and The Daily Beast, where he oversaw the website’s coverage of Washington and wrote about the intersection of politics and the media. Before joining The Daily Beast, Kurtz was the longtime media reporter for The Washington Post, where he wrote a regular column called Media Notes. He joined the newspaper in 1981 after the demise of The Washington Star, and covered urban affairs, the Justice Department and Capitol Hill. He also served as The Washington Post’s New York bureau chief.

Kurtz is the author of five books on the media, most recently Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News War. He is also the author of The Fortune Tellers: Inside Wall Street’s Game of Money, Media, and Manipulation and Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine, a New York Times best-selling book about how the Clinton White House dealt with scandal and the press. Kurtz also has written Hot Air: All Talk All the Time, described by The New Yorker as “the definitive book on the talk show explosion.” His first book, Media Circus: The Trouble with America’s Newspapers, was voted the best recent book about the media by American Journalism Review in 1995.

He has sparred with the likes of Jon Stewart, Whoopi Goldberg, George Clooney, Barbara Walters, Ted Koppel, Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, Jim Lehrer, Keith Olbermann, Jimmy Carter, and John McCain. He has also written for such magazines as Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, The New Republic, the Washington Monthly, New York magazine, and Columbia Journalism Review.

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