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So it turns out Howard Kurtz wasn't exactly fired by The Daily Beast just for his egregious Jason Collins story — but Kurtz's defense that his exit "was in the works for some time" still wasn't pretty: Tina Brown had been "putting together a file" of excuses to fire him, and the big gay cover-up heard 'round the media world let her dump Kurtz and his quarter-million-dollar contract, quickly and affordably.
That's according to Forbes' Jeff Bercovici, who reports that Brown "was already on the verge of letting Kurtz know that his services would no longer be required heading into last week." Indeed, the Newsweek/Daily Beast editrix "had been looking for a way to get rid of him for months." And even though she had compiled Kurtz's biggest screwups of the last few years — his falsely attributing quotes to Darrell Issa and Nancy Pelosi, and more — finding just cause, and a soft PR landing, had proved difficult. Until, of course, Kurtz put himself rather publicly out of his own misery. Kurtz was let go by the Beast at the end of last week after he erroneously reported that Collins hadn't disclosed his previous engagement to a woman in a Sports Illustrated cover story in which he had done exactly that — along with coming out as the first active gay player in a major American team sport. Kurtz faced a huge amount of criticism for being wrong, again.