Kurt Loder

Kurt Loder (born May 5, 1945) is an American journalist, film critic, author, columnist and television personality. He spent nine years as a writer and editor at Rolling Stone, during a tenure that Reason later described as “legendary.” While at the magazine, he co-authored singer Tina Turner's 1986 autobiography, I, Tina.

Loder later became one of the most recognizable figures associated with MTV News. Beginning in the late 1980s, he wrote and hosted the weekly music-news program The Week in Rock and worked as an MTV News anchor, correspondent and interviewer. He remained an on-air presence at the network through the 1990s and into the 2000s and also wrote movie reviews for MTV.com.

He has contributed to publications including Reason, Esquire, Details, New York and Time. He has also appeared as himself in films and television programs. In 2016, he began hosting the SiriusXM interview program True Stories.

Early life

Loder was born in Miami, Florida. He lived in Peru during part of his childhood before his family settled in Ocean City, New Jersey. His father worked for an airline.

Loder graduated from Ocean City High School in 1963. He subsequently attended Oklahoma City University and Temple University for a total of approximately two years, which he later said he “just hated.”

He worked for an Army newspaper while stationed in Europe. Loder later recalled that his first writing assignments came through the newspaper and that the work taught him to report, compose articles and meet publication deadlines.

Loder summarized his formal journalism training by saying:

My entire journalism background is four weeks.... That's it. Nothing else. You can learn journalism in four weeks. It's not an overcomplicated thing. It's very simple.

Career

Early journalism

Loder has said that he “just fell into” journalism rather than deliberately pursuing it through college or a conventional professional training program.

In the summer of 1976, Loder left Ocean City to work for Good Times, a free rock-music weekly published on Long Island. He earned approximately $200 a week.

Circus

Loder and Fricke joined Circus in 1978. Loder became one of the magazine's editors. He later described its staff atmosphere as enjoyable and relaxed but regarded the publication itself as a second- or third-tier music magazine.

The American Film Institute's production history states that producers later considered hiring Loder to rewrite the film but that he declined because he did not feel equipped to reshape the story into the more upbeat treatment they wanted. Kate Lanier received sole screenplay credit.

MTV News

MTV News began as a formal programming operation in 1987 with The Week in Rock, a weekly news program hosted by Loder. MTV recruited him from print journalism to join its news department as an interviewer, correspondent and host.

Although the program began in 1987, Loder has described himself as arriving at MTV in 1988, when his regular work at the network was underway. The broadcast became one of the best-known moments in MTV News history. MTV News subsequently increased the frequency of its programming.

The Week in Rock remained on the air for approximately a decade. Loder continued working as an MTV News anchor and correspondent after the weekly program ended. An archived MTV biography still identified him as a correspondent in 2003. No single widely publicized final broadcast or formal departure date marked the end of his regular MTV work.

When MTV News was closed in 2023, Loder reflected on the division's development and its role in treating music and youth culture as legitimate news subjects.

Film criticism and later work

Loder increasingly concentrated on film criticism during the 2000s. In addition to his MTV.com reviews, he wrote about movies for Reason and Creators Syndicate.

He has said that he prefers the description “movie reviewer” to “film critic,” reserving the latter term for writers with a more scholarly approach to cinema.

In 2011, St. Martin's Press published The Good, the Bad and the Godawful: 21st-Century Movie Reviews. The book collected more than 200 reviews originally written for MTV.com and Reason.

In 2016, Loder began hosting True Stories on the SiriusXM music-talk channel Volume. The monthly program featured extended interviews with musicians, filmmakers and other entertainment figures. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top appeared on its debut episode.

Loder opposed President George H. W. Bush in the 1992 United States presidential election. He later said he believed that MTV News had played a small role in Bush's defeat by encouraging political engagement among younger viewers.

He has criticized government surveillance and regulatory policies associated with former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, whom he called “a scary guy.”

Loder was highly critical of Michael Moore's 2007 documentary Sicko, describing the film as “heavily doctored.”

He argued that the documentary presented a misleading account of government-managed healthcare systems, writing, “When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of healthcare and an unlimited demand for it they're inevitably forced to ration treatment.”

Media and journalism

Loder has defined news as “anything that's interesting.” He has criticized the concept of New Journalism, arguing that it has sometimes been used as a rhetorical shield for lazy or insufficiently factual reporting.

He has said that technological change and the expansion of available media have fragmented American culture to the point that no single musical or cinematic success can unite a mass audience in the way that acts such as The Beatles once did.

Loder strongly supports copyright protections for writers, musicians and other creators. Although generally supportive of digital and new media, he once joked about the size and influence of MTV's corporate ownership: “MTV is part of Viacom, which controls Paramount, and so on and so forth. It's the evil empire.”

Loder has argued that journalists should maintain professional distance from the people they cover:

You shouldn't make friends. It's not a good thing to be friends with people you're covering. There's just no point in doing it. It's tempting, but they're not going to consider you their friend anyway. They just know that you're somebody that can do something for them. So you shouldn't really flatter yourself that they want to be your buddy. They don't.... They want you for some reason or other, and you just have to fend that off all the time. And you can't really cover people critically that you're friends with. How would that work? That would be bad. So you always have to keep that in mind.