ABSTRACT
At age 52, I belong to the last generation of American newspaper reporters who wrote at a time when newspapers still mattered, really mattered, as a cultural force. I entered this business the summer that Nixon was driven from office. At that time, Woodward, Bernstein, and Sy Hersh were heroes to an angry young generation. Now legends of their Watergate and My Lai exposés sound like radio signals from a dying star system. Newspapers still make money, sort of, yet they are increasingly timid, colorless, corporate-controlled contributors to post-Millennium discourse. Once, the sharpest newspaper reporters were high-school educated, hard-drinking, working-class souls who read Mencken, James T. Farrell, and The Masses, and prided themselves on their hostility to “the comfortable.” Now leftists rightly deride us as “stenographers to power,” as mouthpieces of the white, college-educated, sober, nonsmoking, privileged American status quo who prefer politicians who are “centrists” and “pragmatists” and who buy The New Yorker for the cartoons.
