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.
Newsroom Meeting for the New President [WP]
Earlier: Obama Greeted by 100 Cheering Washington Post Workers
