Howie Kurtz: The American Media’s Favorite Weather Pattern Goes Global
Howie Kurtz and the Global Gospel of Self-Reference
By our jaded foreign correspondent who’s watched press corps on five continents eat their own tails
If you zoom out far enough—say, from a café terrace in Lisbon or a newsroom in Lagos—Howard Kurtz looks less like an American media critic and more like a recurring weather pattern. Every few weeks the cloud system labeled “Kurtz” gathers above the Eastern Seaboard, drops a short, sharp shower of self-recrimination on the U.S. press, and then drifts offshore, leaving the rest of the planet to shrug into its already damp overcoat.
To international eyes, the ritual is hypnotic. A man who once helmed CNN’s Reliable Sources—and now hosts a similar perch at Fox News MediaBuzz—publishes a column or tweet that scolds a reporter for an error, real or imagined. American journalists immediately turn their firepower inward, drafting 3,000-word confessionals about “restoring trust.” Meanwhile, in Seoul, a producer glances at the online commotion, mutters “again?” and returns to covering the North Korean missile that just splashed into the Sea of Japan. The planet, inconveniently, refuses to pause for navel-gazing.
Kurtz’s latest turbulence involves his on-air criticism of a rival network’s anonymous-source hygiene, followed by the customary discovery that his own employer had aired an equally thinly sourced story the same morning. Satirical websites in Germany—where the memory of Bild’s checkered past looms large—ran headlines translating roughly to “Fox Accuses Peacock of Plagiarizing Its Own Feathers.” Australia’s ABC wrapped the episode into a segment on “American journalism’s infinite regress,” book-ended by a koala-rescue story that, frankly, felt more urgent.
Why does any of this matter beyond the Beltway? Because the U.S. media empire still exports its neuroses in bulk. When American outlets spend 48 hours meta-analyzing a single misattributed quote, cable bookers from Buenos Aires to Bangalore receive the Associated Press feed and assume the story carries proportional weight for their own viewers. The result: a Brazilian panel debates a New York Times correction as if it were a referendum on democracy itself, while local corruption scandals slip past unnoticed—rather like obsessing over a hangnail as gangrene climbs the leg.
Kurtz, then, is both symptom and carrier. He embodies the uniquely American conviction that journalism’s primary beat should be journalism, an ouroboros that keeps ratings healthy and accountability conveniently circular. Overseas, reporters who dodge lawsuits, jail time, or the occasional car bomb find the spectacle bemusing. “Must be nice,” a Filipino colleague told me after the latest Kurtz-fueled self-flagellation, “to have so little else to fear that you can afford to fear yourselves.”
There is, of course, a darker punchline. In the Philippines, Russia, Hungary, and dozens of other locales, governments happily conflate any legitimate critique of the press with the reflexive, everything-is-crisis tenor borrowed from U.S. media critics. When Kurtz thunders that “the media are their own worst enemy,” state propagandists translate the segment, strip out the irony, and replay it as proof that all journalists everywhere are liars. Nothing buoys a strongman quite like an American pundit supplying the rope for him.
And yet the show goes on, because the business model demands it. Every mea culpa generates clicks; every click feeds the algorithm; every algorithmic nudge persuades news executives that what the public truly craves is another round of insider apologia. The globe’s actual problems—say, a looming food shortage that could tip three continents into unrest—compete for oxygen with yet another segment dissecting whether a cable anchor mispronounced a congressman’s name.
Will Howie Kurtz single-handedly sink journalism? Unlikely. The profession has survived Hearst, McCarthy, and the invention of the 24-second TikTok attention span. But as long as the loudest critiques emerge from inside the house, the international audience will keep watching the same sitcom rerun: a superpower endlessly surprised that its mirror reflects imperfections, while the rest of us wait for the weather to change—and for the forecast to mention something other than itself.
