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By Verne Gay
verne.gay@newsday.com
Marvin Kitman, the former Newsday TV critic who was among the paper's best-known columnists over its 83-year history, has died. He was 93.
His son, Jamie Kitman, said his father - who retired from Newsday after a 35-year run in 2005 - had been diagnosed with cancer two months ago, and spent the last month at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey, near his home in Leonia.
Prolific book author, TV commentator for WNYW/5, and even stunt candidate for president in 1964, Kitman had a colorful and expansive career beyond Newsday. But it was at Long Island's paper of record and in that column - "The Marvin Kitman Show'' - where he achieved renown and notoriety too. He produced some 5,786 of those as its so-called "executive producer" starting in 1969.
Network TV executives, for the most part, loathed him while readers couldn't seem to get enough of him.
Kitman's beat was confined to the three commercial networks, the local stations and public TV. He torched all of them, in a rat-a-tat joke-a-minute style that was inimitably his own. To his detractors, he could be mean-spirited, but to his fans - who far outnumbered them - he was a bracing tonic who laughed...