You’re not going to believe this, but last year C-SPAN broadcast a news media get-together that did not put everyone to sleep. As a rule, soul-searching sessions of media stars, or journalistic entities, as Wes Pruden of the Washington Times calls them, end in self-congratulatory hosannas to their integrity and their courage in calling it...
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A Bright Shining Liar
“To be engaged in opposing wrong affords but a slender guarantee for being right.” —William Ewart Gladstone A quarter century has gone by since David Halberstam, foreign correspondent for The New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize that he said should have gone to his friend and mentor in Vietnam, Neil Sheehan. In 1964’s spring...
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The Friends of Peter Ustinov
“Peter Ustinov’s Russia” has been making the rounds of Public Broadcasting television stations with a timely plug for Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost, and raising the hair on the back of my neck. The British-born comedian, author, and mimic confesses, with the shrug of a sophisticated actor, that his series is not the complete story. It...