ABSTRACT
My first encounter with a professional journalist was an interview with Peter Arnett, then at the Associated Press. It was the late 1970s, and I was a bearded graduate student from Berkeley writing my dissertation on the media and Vietnam, a story which Arnett had covered since the early 1960s. He assumed from my background that I would want to know why journalists hadn’t taken a stronger stand against the war; this was the era when advocacy journalism enjoyed a heyday of sorts—quite brief and marginal, really—as a challenger to the journalistic mainstream. So he launched into an articulate defense of what he called ‘Establishment journalism.’ Just by reporting the facts, he said, journalists had contributed more effectively to ending the war than they could have done in any other way.
