[There was a video here]

Howard Kurtz, whose bizarre, incoherent article on Jason Collins earlier this week led to his departure from the Daily Beast, offered a long, mostly awkward apology on his own show, CNN's Reliable Sources.

Kurtz opened the show, saying, “It was a mistake that I made and it was sloppy and inexcusable." He also apologized for the “inappropriate" tone he took in a video he made for the Daily Download, the strange, little-watched website he contributes to.

Kurtz was then interrogated by Politico's Dylan Byers and NPR's David Folkenflik over his bizarre article and resistance to retraction or correction. Folkenflik asked Kurtz, "Why didn’t you have the decency to apologize to him at that time when you knew what you had written was wrong?”

“I handled it wrong and convinced myself that I could soften the wording,” Kurtz told him. “I should have retracted it immediately."

Byers then continued to press Kurtz about mistakes he's made in recent years, “You claimed to have interviewed Darrell Issa and later admitted that you actually had interviewed one of his aides. You attributed a quote to Nancy Pelosi that it turns out she did not say. In addition to this, you also said that Fox News host Greta Van Susteren was casting doubts on Hillary Clinton’s illness. In fact she had been a defender against people who had cast such doubts.”

Asked whether he, as a media critic, would view his own career favorably, Kurtz said, he would like this affair “to be viewed in the full context of my career."