This Day in Journalism History (Raines Begins Trying ‘Times’ Running the Gray Lady)

Sept. 5, 2001—Howell Raines took over as executive editor of The New York Times with superabundant self-confidence. In two stormy years atop the “paper of record,” he exuded a grating self-righteousness. Several years later, following revelations of widespread fabrication and fraud by reporter Jayson Blair on his watch, he reviewed his fall from the newspaper where he had worked for 25 years with self-pity.

Less than a week after assuming control, Raines threw the paper’s overwhelming resources into the biggest story that he and other journalists had ever covered: the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

At first, it seemed to vindicate his philosophy of “flooding the zone,” or devoting saturation coverage to a major news event, day after day. In his first year at the helm, The Times won Pulitzer Prizes, including the first given to its metro desk since the 1950s.

But more than he or his acolytes realized, all that celebration and self-congratulation were not entirely warranted.

First, the staff responsible for producing the prize-winning stories (including its ongoing special section, “A Nation Challenged”) had been largely picked and guided by predecessor Joseph Lelyveld.

Second, as noted in Eric Boehlert’s Salon post-mortem on the scandal that ended Howell’s reign, top editors’ direction of the DC bureau’s news coverage “represented an unprecedented attempt to micromanage the newspaper and infuriated editors and reporters, many of whom began to flee to other papers and other jobs.”

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the newspaper who had selected Raines for the top editorial post, should have taken more seriously a December 2022 Newsweek article warning of newsroom rumblings about this direction. 

He must have sensed that, for all his friend’s talent (a Pulitzer Prize winner himself, for a 1992 Times Magazine essay about his family’s maid, Grady Hutchinson, in the segregated South of his childhood) and experience (bureau chief stints in Atlanta, London, and Washington), Raines needed to relax his management style.

According to Ken Auletta’s June 2002 New Yorker profile, “The Howell Doctrine,” Sulzberger not only cautioned Raines that he could not employ the star system he had used as Washington bureau chief, but confided in associates "that he would have blocked Raines’ promotion [to executive editor] if Sulzberger was not convinced that he had changed.”

But you might as well ask a leopard to change its spots. It wasn’t enough that Raines thought he had a mandate from Sulzberger to make the paper “smarter, livelier, and more appealing to the geographically diverse and demanding national audience on which its future depends,” as he put it in a May 2004 Atlantic Monthly account of his tenure. 

He also saw a conflict between “the senior editors who endorsed these improvements and traditionalists on the newsroom floor and among mid-level managers.” The latter, he claimed, “wanted the paper to stay the way it was.”

The members of the latter faction went unnamed. There is every reason to think that the claim was fatuous, a grope in the dark by a former journalism giant too blind to understand how his own failings led to his departure from the job he craved and the paper he loved.

In his first day on the job, Raines thought he was sending a symbolic signal to staff by putting on his desk a copy of the Charles Gaines 1972 novel Stay Hungry, the application of which seemed obvious to him in a competitive news environment.

But he missed the other signals that the newsroom picked up about his imperious manner in fielding questions at breakfasts and lunches, including an expression that even friends thought made him look like “an angry hawk.”

Terms other than “flooding the zone” might better describe the coverage that Raines soon assigned to some topics, with the most polite being “crusade.” “Obsession” would fit even better. “Hobbyhorse” might have worked especially well in some instances:

* The verdict was most mixed on the Roman Catholic Church abuse scandal. No doubt, an institution to which one in five Americans belonged at the time needed to be scrutinized, and there was no doubt that exposing the misdeeds of individual priests and the coverup by the hierarchy prevented countless future crimes. But the number of collective column inches, the lack of oversight on individual stories, and the secular viewpoint of the paper’s staff and readership raised real questions about objectivity and even anti-Catholic bias. (For instance, assuming that TV showrunner David Kelley was “raised Catholic,” it headlined a review of one of his scripts about the abuse scandal, “A Catholic Writer Brings His Anger to 'The Practice'”—and needed to run a correction when it turned out that Kelley was, in fact, raised Protestant.) Moreover, Raines’ motives for propelling the coverage were hardly pure; Martin Baron, executive editor of The Boston Globe, later told Roy Harris for a 2008 article for Poynter that he heard his counterpart at the Times was “annoyed that we were onto the biggest story of the year and seemingly headed to a Pulitzer,” and determined that his paper would cover it at the national level and consign the Globe to local stories about the scandal.

*The Bush administration claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction was certainly covered in depth, but without the skepticism it deserved. A 2004 “Editor’s Note,” after an internal investigation, concluded that Judith Miller’s stories on this justification for the war buildup that “information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged” by senior management at the time—an assessment that Raines predictably took issue with.

* Campaigning incessantly for the Augusta National Golf Course to open to women was hardly the most consequential story in Raines’ tenure, but it was certainly the one that provoked the most ridicule. The revelation of spiked columns by two writers who disagreed with the position only made matters worse.

But the Blair fiasco represented a fundamental challenge to the Times’ credibility that could not be ignored.

What Raines’ friends and defenders downplayed, in noting that other journalists were not forced out of their positions or faced such dire damage to their reputations for their misdeeds, were the sheet multiplicity and breadth of Blair’s transgressions, including fake quotes; locations supposedly visited even as he sat in his Brooklyn apartment; details invented from photographs and other news reports; and passages plagiarized from other reporters.

An exhaustive, nearly 7,500-word post-mortem that, to his credit, Raines authorized, concluded that at least 36 of Blair’s final 73 stories filed before his resignation were tainted by fraud. 

Worse, high-level figures such as Washington editor Jill Abramson and metro editor Jonathan Landman had been raising red flags, with Landman even warning, in a blunt April 2002 memo, “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”

Five works elapsed after Blair's firing before Sulzberger took further action. When Raines could not contain the mushrooming scandal or the newsroom muttering that had now become a cacophony, he and managing editor Gerald Boyd were forced to resign.

The disappointment must have been enormous when Raines finally grasped that he would function as an agent of change at the Gray Lady in a far different fashion than he expected.

Largely because of the Blair scandal, the Times instituted the ombudsman position (or, as they called it, a “public editor”), an independent watchdog who investigated reader complaints of inaccuracy and unfairness. 

Six journalists performed that function for the next 14 years, until the paper decided that the rise of social media helped maintain accountability. (I still think that was a mistake.)

In Andy Robinson’s July 2017 retrospective on the position in the Columbia Journalism Review, Margaret Sullivan, the penultimate Times public editor, noted the scandal epitomized “so many issues that were and still are happening in newsrooms: the effort to diversify the staff, people who find mentors, the pressure that reporters are under, the intense pressure that they’re under at places like The New York Times, the things that can go wrong, the way that in the new age you could simply be talking to your editor on your cell phone, and they wouldn’t know where you were.”

Quote of the Day (Graydon Carter, on Bygone High-Flying Days in Magazine Journalism)

“Going from Spy and the Observer to Vanity Fair was like moving from a youth hostel to a five-star hotel….When traveling on business, I stayed at the Connaught in London, the Ritz in Paris, the Hotel du Cap in the South of France, and the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Bel-air in Los Angeles…Staff members could expense their breakfasts — not a working breakfast with a writer or photographer. Just breakfast. Large dinners at home were catered. Flowers went out to contributors at an astounding rate, sometimes just for turning a story in on time. One staff member who was a holdover from the old regime would get so depressed at the mere thought of my being there that she would send flowers to herself just to perk up her spirits. On the company account, of course.”—Magazine editor Graydon Carter, on moving to Vanity Fair in 1992, in When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines (2025)

I admit to being a sucker for anything relating the inside story of major book and magazine publishers. And so, when excerpts from Graydon Carter’s memoir appeared in The Atlantic and New York magazines, I snatched them up eagerly.

But I also must confess to reading the one in New York—a distillation of his 25 years editing the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Dominick Dunne, and Marie Brenner—more eagerly than the less gossipy one in Vanity Fair, which focused on his youthful adventures working for the Canadian National Railroad.

Part of my fascination with the New York article stemmed from seeing to what extent Carter would vent secrets from the Conde Nast empire.

He congratulates himself for making “the culture less poisonous” than the one inherited from Tina Brown, while fending off “deeply hostile and subversive” holdovers from the old regime. (Yes, Faithful Reader, he names four of the principal culprits among the latter, even briefly discussing how they practiced the black arts of office politics.)

But I was also fascinated by what I highlighted in the “Quote of the Day,” on the deep pockets once held at Vanity Fair and other magazines. Over the years, several staffers in those establishments from the Seventies through the Nineties told me about the perks once enjoyed at those organizations.

One young woman discussed how Malcolm Forbes gave company employees a holiday for his birthday, “like some medieval lord treating his serfs,” she chuckled. And a Vanity Fair article about the late Time art critic Robert Hughes was subtitled “A Tale from the Mythic Days of Magazine Expense Accounts.”

All of that has changed because of corporate takeovers that have enabled accounts to pull tighter strings, as well as, of course, the Internet, where advertisers can find a digital alternative to print media. Increasingly, publishing days of wine and roses will be recalled by writers and editors lucky to find outlets for their memories—or in oral histories.

(The image accompanying this post, of Graydon Carter at the Vanity Fair kickoff part for the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, was taken Apr. 21, 2009, by David Shankbone.)

Quote of the Day (Carl Hiaasen, on the Growing Necessity for Reporters)

“People can’t get outraged [at the political arena] without rapid access to solid, useful information—what we used to call journalism. There’s so much garbage being disguised as fact and so many gasbags posing as sages; somebody has to cut through the crap. That’s the job of reporters, and their job will be more important than at any time in history. There’s been this great lamentation about the end of newspapers as we know them, the end of the era of the paper hitting your doorstep in the morning, but I don’t think the language or the craft of writing is dying. In the next 40 years, there’s going to be a larger demand than ever for people who can communicate with the written word, whatever format it takes.”—American crime novelist and retired Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen, “Slipping Backward” (part of a “40 Things To Know” article cluster), interviewed by T. A. Frail, Smithsonian, July-August 2010

Fifteen years ago today, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for unlimited campaign spending to corporations and other outside groups by ruling that any restrictions constituted a violation of freedom of speech.

In his Smithsonian Q&A, Hiaasen denounced the decision as “toxic to the whole democratic process,” and correctly predicted that “From now on, it’s basically going to be all the free speech that money can buy.”

Besides the communication skill that Hiaasen identified, more will be needed for the journalism of the present and future to affect the political process, however: the fearlessness of its practitioners and the open-mindedness of its readers. The portents for both these factors are deeply troubling right now.

While the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has twisted freedom of speech beyond recognition, it has permitted a lack of legal accountability for a President’s misdeeds and signaled, through Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, that its landmark New York Times v. Sullivan freedom of the press ruling might be up for reconsideration.

Even with an unfettered press, there’s no guarantee that, in the present digital environment dominated by what Hiaasen calls “gasbags posing as sages,” their revelations will be acted upon. 

“Confirmation bias”—the tendency to seek out and accept anything supporting our beliefs and ignoring anything contradicting them—has only solidified in the current polarized environment.

I’m not sure that I am any more hopeful than Hiaasen was 15 years ago. I only know that not to push back against these troubling trends constitutes preemptive, unconditional surrender that will haunt the democratic process now and into the foreseeable future. 

(For more information on the baleful effects of Citizen United—including the influx of secret “dark money” into elections—and what can be done to bring about campaign finance reform, I urge you to read Tim Lau’s December 2019 report for the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.)

Quote of the Day (Joseph Pulitzer, on a ‘Public-Spirited Press’ and Public Virtue)

“Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”—Hungarian-born American newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911), “The College of Journalism,” North American Review, May 1904

Flashback, December 1973: Murdoch Gains American Toehold With San Antonio Paper Acquisition

Completing a $19.7 million purchase of the morning San Antonio Express and afternoon San Antonio News from Harte-Hanks Newspapers Inc., Rupert Murdoch was able to secure his first American properties 50 years ago this month.

The purchase launched the Australian on a course that made him the most formidable media baron of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, with properties around the world, a perch from which he finally stepped down a few months ago at age 92.

At age 21, Murdoch inherited a single afternoon Australian tabloid from his father, the foundation of what became News Corp. In 1969, having bought a string of papers in his own country, he turned to the British market when he bought the weekly News of the World and the daily London Sun.  

With his San Antonio acquisitions, he planned to import the same formula that had made him a success on Fleet Street, what I would call “3C X S”: i.e., crime, controversy, and cheesecake times scandal.

More specifically, it meant in his papers screaming headlines, faux anti-elitism, and manufactured outrage—and, in the newsroom, ousters of key managers and staffers as well as broken promises about editorial independence.

Murdoch entered the American market just as the Watergate scandal was slowly but steadily eroding support for Richard Nixon. Disdain for Tricky Dick’s opponents was as much a part of the publisher’s DNA as scorn for journalistic objectivity or ethical newsgathering methods. (“The American press might get their pleasure in successfully crucifying Nixon,” he said, “but the last laugh could be on them. See how they like it when the Commies take over the West.” He could never imagine a world in which both Nixon and “the Commies” would be gone.)

Given that Murdoch was far more enthusiastic about Nixon than he has been in private about Donald Trump, I think it highly probable that Nixon could have survived his growing scandals if he had Murdoch’s backing when the publisher’s American holdings reached their eventual peak.

Even as he was getting ready to invade San Antonio, he was seeking a wider arena for his outsized ambitions. He would have those in just a couple of years, launching The National Star (later, renamed simply The Star) as a supermarket tabloid competitor of The National Enquirer in February 1974 and transforming the faded liberal daily The New York Post into a rabid right-wing publication after his acquisition in 1976.

Nevertheless, it is one of the ironies of the past half-century, when daily newspapers withered successively under the assault of the evening news, 24-hour cable stations, and the Internet, Murdoch remained one of the most enthusiastic supporters or print against electronic journalism. 

(The newspaper portion of his empire might be considerably slimmed down, if his successor, son Lachlan Murdoch—notably less enthusiastic about the old medium—has his way, according to this September 2023 AP article by Pan Pylas and Jill Lawless.)

Though the Murdoch empire has, with more than a little truth, been credited with creating the conditions for Trumpism, the denial of climate science may be the most lasting and pernicious legacy of the publisher’s.

Had Murdoch’s influence merely extended to America, he would just bear responsibility for the rise of a homegrown demagogue. But because he is invested in six continents, he has been able to undermine climate-science advocates and erode diplomatic and legislative efforts to curb the greatest existential threat of our time.

It took two screenwriters, Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, to depict in fictional terms one of the early “yellow journalists”: William Randolph Hearst, in “Citizen Kane.”

In contrast, Murdoch was translated into fiction by the novelist Edward St Aubyn, in Dunbar, a 2017 retelling of King Lear, and Jesse Armstrong and his team of writers for the recently concluded series Succession.

Compared with other newspapers that he kept alive despite constant losses (notably, The New York Post, which only recorded its first annual profit in modern history this past year), San Antonio’s News and Express fell by the wayside relatively quickly in the Murdoch stable of newspapers.

After bamboozling readers for a decade with headlines like “Ax Attacker Kills Sleeper,” “Armies of Insects Marching on S.A.,” and “Uncle Tortures Tots with Hot Fork,” Murdoch began to hedge his bets with the two papers he’d bought, closing the News in favor of a reconstituted Express-News in 1984, then selling that to his longtime rival in the San Antonio market, the Hearst Corp.

Now, it was America, not just San Antonio, that he was looking to conquer. In the end, it would involve telling people what they most wanted to hear, even if his private views were far different.

To satisfy the legal requirement that only American citizens could own U.S. TV stations, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen in September 1985. Still, there is reason to wonder if he has anything other than contempt for the great mass of his adopted countrymen—or if he feels any sensitivity at all to those less fortunate than him.

In Michael Wolff’s recent book about the Murdochs and their empire, The Fall, Rupert is quoted taking a swipe at both his Fox evening anchor, Sean Hannity, and, implicitly, in the most insulting manner possible, many in the latter’s audience: “He’s retarded, like most Americans.”

In word and action, Murdoch might be the best example of what columnist H.L. Mencken meant nearly a century ago in concluding, “No one in this world, so far as I know...has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."

Quote of the Day (Molly Ivins, on the Problem With Political Reporting)

"There was a time when explaining how what the government does affects ‘ordinary people’ was considered political reporting. But reporters somehow became more fixated on the polls, the consultants, the horse race, and the partisan bickering; ordinary people pretty much fell off the screen. . . . The difference between one underassistant secretary and another assistant undersecretary is still turning people's lives upside down; indeed, it can be the difference between life and death." — Columnist Molly Ivins (1944-2007), Bushwacked: Life in George W. Bush's America (2005)

Quote of the Day (Carl Hiaasen, on the Consequences of Declining Hometown Journalism)

“Retail corruption is now a breeze, since newspapers and other media can no longer afford enough reporters to cover all the key government meetings. You wake up one day, and they’re bulldozing 20 acres of pines at the end of your block to put up a Costco. Your kids ask what’s going on, and you can’t tell them because you don’t have a clue.

“That’s what happens when hometown journalism fades — neighborhood stories don’t get reported until it’s too late, after the deal’s gone down. Most local papers are gasping for life, and if they die it will be their readers who lose the most.”—Crime novelist Carl Hiaasen, in his last column for The Miami Herald, “With or Without Me, Florida Will Always Be Wonderfully, Unrelentingly Weird,” The Miami Herald, Mar. 12, 2021

(The attached photo of Carl Hiassen, originally appearing on the author’s Web site, was taken by Joe Rimkus Jr.)

This Day in Media History (Marguerite Higgins, First Woman to Win Pulitzer for International Reporting, Born)

Sept. 3, 1920—Marguerite Higgins, who overcame the rampant sexism of her time and profession to become the first female winner of the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting, was born in Hong Kong, in the Asia-Pacific Rim where she would establish much of her reputation.

In the Library of America anthology Reporting World War II, Higgins was the last by birth among the approximately 80 writers represented. A day shy of 25 when Japan formally surrendered, she reported on some of the major stories coming out of the latest six months of the European conflict: the refugee crisis and the liberation of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.

These would have been great scoops for any reporter. They were extraordinary for a recent graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and a woman in an unrelieved, unapologetic masculine environment.

But it was in Asia—specifically, in Korea and Vietnam—where Higgins advanced closer to achieving her stated post-collegiate goal of becoming more famous than Dorothy Thompson, perhaps the most influential female journalist of the day. How she moved towards her goal has made her the subject of speculation and even controversy ever since.

Stationed in Tokyo as the New York Herald Tribune’s Bureau Chief, Higgins was ideally situated to cover the outbreak of hostilities in Korea in 1950. Despite her credentials as a war correspondent in WWII, she was initially ordered out of the country by Gen. Walton Walker.

Only a direct appeal to Douglas MacArthur, who had become Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command in Korea, enabled her to report on the conflict. She joined MacArthur's troops on the daring invasion at Inchon that, for a time, changed the direction of the war. In fact, she was the only female reporter to land on Red Beach (“a rough, vertical pile of stones”) with the men.

The Pulitzer Prize committee cited Higgins’ "enterprise and courage" in her coverage of the campaign, noting that she deserved "special consideration by reason of being a woman." But even as she was winning a new level of renown, she was stirring animosity among the largely male cadre of war correspondents that would dog her even beyond her early death.

Thousands of readers were amazed at how Higgins smashed through conventions that restricted women’s chances for achievement; a smaller cadre of colleagues were disgruntled at how they believed she ignored traditional ethical codes in pursuit of her laurels. It is still not easy sorting through these issues more than a half-century after her death.

While displaying outward bravado, Higgins was inwardly driven by an insecurity so unrelenting that it manifested itself as bravery so extreme that some males believe it shaded into foolhardiness. (Among them was Herald Tribune colleague Homer Bigart, who, like Gen. Walker, wanted her out of the country--leading not just to heightened competition between the two journalists but also to a closely watched feud between the two.) 

Such aggressiveness might be taken for granted among male reporters but were eyed critically when exhibited by females—and led to speculation that Higgins was not above stealing colleagues’ scoops.

Another serious charge against her arose from her good looks. Anyone glimpsing the stunning blonde in the attached photo might be forgiven for thinking that Betty Grable or even Marilyn Monroe had suddenly morphed into a top-flight journalist.

Those same people were often convinced that someone that glamorous could not have succeeded through her own efforts, but by sleeping with important men to further her career. 

In the process, these critics ignored factors that facilitated her work—knowledge of French and Chinese; extraordinary sympathy and compassion for young soldiers that sealed their bond with her; and willingness to endure extreme discomfort and danger.

(Ironically, when particularly obsessed with a story, Higgins was so oblivious to how she looked that she neglected to clean her face.)

Opinion remains divided to what extent those charges were true. But, if ruthlessness in pursuing scoops and straying outside traditional sexual norms are to be assessed, many if not most of Higgins’ male rivals would be as guilty as she.

A third charge against Higgins is more troubling: that, through personal associations and ideological preconceptions, she abandoned objectivity in her reporting on the early days of the Vietnam War. 

In 1963, younger reporters such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan were making plain in their dispatches that South Vietnamese forces were collapsing in the Mekong Delta. Based on her high-ranking military sources, Higgins disagreed strongly, airing their view that the Viet Cong were being progressively crushed. Any problem in Southeast Asia had resulted from journalists accepting at face value the notion that Buddhists in Vietnam were being oppressed by President Ngo Dinh Diem's "Catholic-dominated government":

"In the fall of 1963 Washington went into the business of hiring and firing governments,” Higgins charged in Our Vietnam Nightmare. “We not only forgot the one overriding priority, the war effort, but also, for the first time in history, conspired in the ouster of an ally in the middle of a common war against the Communist enemy, thus plunging the country and the war effort into a steep spiral of decline."

Higgins was ill-prepared to examine the reality of Vietnam dispassionately. In 1947, she had witnessed how Communists employed deception in taking over Poland. Friendly with both Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, she had adopted their view of the need to counter Soviet aggression. And, in 1952, she had married William Evens Hall, an Air Force Lt. General.

Vietnam undermined the credibility of a fellow journalist who accepted the government line, columnist Joe Alsop. Long before that happened, a tropical disease contracted in that country led to Higgins’ death in 1966 at age 45. She is one of a handful of war correspondents buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

During her lifetime, Americans became very familiar with the sight of Higgins—in well-attended lectures, her book covers (War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent and News is a Singular Thing), and TV appearances (in 1956, the quiz show What’s My Line?). 

Though her celebrity has faded, her face and story have still attracted enough posthumous attention to land her on a postage stamp (in 2002) and have made her the best-known character in a little-noticed film about the early days of the Korean War last year, The Battle of Jangsari.

I have not yet seen that movie, but in a sense its most famous cast member, Megan Fox, should be able to identify intensely with Higgins. In both women’s cases, men were so besotted by their looks that they sometimes had a difficult time taking their drive and work seriously. Time will tell how well Fox counteracts that perception.

Indomitable Eyewitness: Gotham Bard Pete Hamill, RIP

Pete Hamill had witnessed and written about many of the deadliest events in his country’s history, and after a New Year’s Eve celebration nearly 50 years ago he feared so much that his own alcoholism might lead him to an early grave that he never picked up a drink again.

Even in the past couple of years, with his body failing, his mind remained filled with purpose and projects. That’s why the news of his death this past week at age 85 makes it all the harder to think that we won’t get to hear what he thinks anymore.

Hamill was a throwback to a time when newspapers really mattered. In his later years, he turned his hand increasingly to fiction. But newsrooms proved an addiction he never wanted to shake.

Two brief stints editing The New York Post and The Daily News led him to concentrate on what ailed his profession. The answer was not surprising for someone who made his reputation as a columnist: papers required a voice to distinguish them not just from hometown rivals, but also counterparts across the country:

“Somehow the experience of being in Chicago seems unfocused since the death of Mike Royko,” Hamill observed in News is a Verb:Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century. “San Francisco certainly is not the same since the death of Herb Caen. Big, swaggering voices and intensely passionate voices are giving way to bland, interchangeable voices that wouldn’t frighten a rabbit. Almost all daily newspapers seem to resemble all other newspapers in the way they choose the news, the way they cover it, and the way they present it. Newspapers are more and more like television, where all local news shows resemble all other local news shows.”

A “swaggering” voice? No. “Intensely passionate”? Absolutely. Alternately angry, streetwise, open to the possibilities of all he encountered, Hamill blended a Whitmanesque love of a bursting city with an Irish-American kid’s intense bond with the Brooklyn where he grew up and died.

A collection of his columns was titled Irrational Ravings, taking its name from Spiro Agnew's description of his writing. Readers have their own favorites in the vast amount of material he produced over the years. Two that sprang to mind for me in the immediate aftermath of his death: the Grammy-winning liner notes for Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and a 1977 column lamenting M. Donald Grant’s exile of the great Tom Seaver from the Mets.

But that was before I had a chance to read some of Hamill’s eyewitness accounts of the defining cataclysms of his—our—time. For instance, few have narrated the terror of 9/11 as grippingly as he did:

“Above us, at 9.55, the first of the towers began to collapse. We heard snapping sounds, pops, little explosions, and then the walls bulged out, and we heard a sound like an avalanche. Everything then happened in fragments. I yell to my wife, "Run!" And we start together, and this immense cloud is rolling at us. Bodies come smashing together in the doorway of 25 Vesey Street and I can't see my wife, and when I push to get out, I'm driven into the lobby. I keep calling her name, and saying, "I've got to get out of here, please, my wife..." We're deep in the lobby, behind walls, and the glass doors are locked tight. We look for a back door. There is none. A half-dozen of us go down narrow stairs.

“I'm desperate now to get out, to find my wife, to be sure she's alive, to hug her in the horror. But I'm sealed with these others inside the tomblike basement of an office building. Then there's a sound of splintering glass. One of the emergency workers has smashed open the glass doors. I feel as if I've been there for an hour; only 14 minutes have passed.”

Or this, on the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the friend he had urged to run for President:

“I saw Kennedy lurch against the ice machine, and then sag, and then fall forward slowly, to be grabbed by someone, and I knew then that he was dead. He might linger a few hours, or a few days; but his face reminded me somehow of Benny Paret the night Emile Griffith hammered him into unconsciousness. Kennedy’s face had a kind of sweet acceptance to it, the eyes understanding that it had come to him, the way it had come to so many others before him. The price of the attempt at excellence was death. You saw a flicker of that understanding on his face, as his life seeped out of a hole in the back of his skull, to spread like spilled wine across the scummy concrete floor.”

The decline of the newspaper world that Hamill loved could be marked by the nemeses at the dawn and end of his career, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.

Hamill regarded Nixon with fear, seeing him in 1977 as “the Bela Lugosi of American politics, lying out there in the crypt of San Clemente, and rising into the darkness at night.”

In contrast, Hamill could only view Trump with cold contempt as a prime example of the “celebrity virus” affecting journalism, underscoring the mogul’s “jowly megalomania” two decades ago, in News is a Verb:

“Trump flies to the spotlight, even demands it. His motto seems to be ‘I'm written about, therefore I exist.’ He personally telephones gossip columnists and reporters to present them with stories about the wonders of himself, his great love life, his brusque divorces. In the spirit of true collaboration, the newspapers quote ‘sources close to Trump’ as their authority, a code known to other editors and reporters but not revealed to the readers. In a way, Trump has his own brilliance. He has a genius for self-inflation, for presenting an illusion of accomplishment that often becomes the accomplishment itself. A tiny solar system now revolves around Trump's own self-created persona: his ex-wives, Ivana Trump and Marla Maples Trump, followed by his poor teenage daughter, Ivanka Trump, who as I write is being hurled into the world of fashion models under the benevolent gaze of Daddy. This vulgar saga threatens to go on and on.”

At the same time, as far back as 1969, Hamill detected a major crack in the former New Deal coalition that led to stunning victories for Nixon, Ronald Reagan and, eventually, Trump. In "The Revolt of the Lower Middle Class," he listened to and reported on the discontent of blue-collar ethnic Catholics on racial issues--and, more disturbingly, their susceptibility to television's "politics of theatre" that helped thrust a shameless real estate huckster into the Oval Office.

I met Hamill on a couple of occasions. Once was in the mid-'70s, at the apex of journalism’s glamour in the wake of Watergate, when he spoke in Bergen County, NJ, on a panel about investigative reporting with Gabe Pressman, Nick Pileggi, and Jack Newfield. I remember him saying that by "investigative journalism," most people probably had in mind muckraking. But the way he thought of it, all journalism was "investigative" if it told people something they may not have known already.

At a time when I was seriously thinking of becoming a journalist, that observation made a great impression on me. Even now, some 45 years later, when I have pursued more general fact-based writing, I have found it enormously useful to keep in mind. Nonfiction lives so long as both writer and reader learn something new in the course of encountering the reality behind the material.

I’m sorry I didn’t seize the chance to talk to Hamill afterward. Several friends who did get to know him have mentioned how his warmth, generosity and personal example inspired them in the newsroom.

That approachability and equanimity, I think, differentiated him from a friend and colleague who also rose to fame in the 1960s: Jimmy Breslin. A 2018 HBO documentary on these “deadline artists” have led many viewers to see the two in a similar light: largely self-taught Irish-Americans, onetime habitues of smoky saloons, and liberal lions in a newsroom age that might as well be ancient Rome compared with today.

But, with an irascibility that could flare into downright pugnacity, Breslin, for all his gifts as a writer (enough to earn him a Pulitzer for commentary), would never have been named an editor of a tabloid, as Hamill was twice in the 1990s, at the New York Post and the Daily News. 

Hamill had the charisma to motivate staffers with his mission of a tabloid that would reach out to striving immigrant communities. Unfortunately, his vision diverged from those papers’ owners, and he was terminated before his innovations could take hold.

That second stage in Hamill’s career was only possible because, at a critical moment, he freed himself from the “stoic ethic” and “liquid alchemy” connecting his Brooklyn upbringing and the world of Ernest Hemingway.

Hamill owned up to all his mistakes made while under the influence in his evocative 1994 memoir, A Drinking Life. He got out at the right time, before he hit rock bottom and could have been robbed of the memory necessary for writing. In the end, he came away with a multitude of friends and just as many stories, all narrated in a rich whiskey baritone that left listeners craving every word.

About two decades ago, Hamill was interviewed on TV about the impact of drinking on Ernest Hemingway, a crucial early influence on his own work. The quality of Hemingway's work fell off so much toward the end of his life, Hamill observed, because drinking affected his judgment, so he could never finish his work as easily as he once did. I couldn't help feeling that Hamill had been looking at what could have easily happened to himself, and that he was so grateful he avoided it.

Nobody with blunt opinions expressed through a mass medium is without detractors, and Hamill was no exception. They did not come exclusively from the right wing (and, in light of later events, his placement on Nixon's "enemies list" was surely a source of envy to his friends). 

Some, for instance, have criticized the columnist for his initial sharp denunciation for the "Central Park 5" in what is now universally seen as a miscarriage of justice. In the past week, Ross Barkan chided him as an "irrepressible sentimentalist."

But DNA was not so common in criminal investigations at the time of the Central Park case, and Hamill demonstrated in A Drinking Life that he was hardly unaware of the dangers of the provincialism in his Brooklyn neighborhood to what Barkan calls "a deeply complex, flawed and inevitably flawed society."

A year and a half ago, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Hamill spoke of the importance of libraries to him, in a way that I, with a similar blue-collar ethnic background, could identify with:

“I come from the white working class, but I was fortunate. I had parents that thought things would be better tomorrow or the day after tomorrow and the way out of poverty was through the library. My mother got me a library card when I was five. I couldn't read yet, and there were mothers like that all over New York.”

I hope that, in the years ahead, future children of the working class will go into their own libraries and look up Hamill’s work, to know how Americans lived and survived in a tumultuous time.

(Photo of Pete Hamill taken in Brooklyn in September 2007 by David Shankbone.)

This Day in TV History (Murrow Assails McCarthy-Bred Fear and ‘Age of Unreason’)

March 9, 1954—In a hard-hitting takedown of unusual daring for television news at the time, CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow (pictured) spotlighted to a nationwide audience the dangers to American civil liberties posed by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the Red Scare engulfing America. 

The year before, Murrow had given over an entire episode of his show See It Now to Milo Radulovich, a 28-year-old lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve, who was discharged as a security risk because of allegedly communistic sympathies of his father and sister. 

But this time on See It Now, Murrow was going directly at the senator who, in just four years, had ridden the fear of Communism gripping the nation to a position where he had intimidated not just ordinary citizens and government bureaucrats, but even his own peers on Capitol Hill. Murrow employed no investigatory work, merely used McCarthy’s own words to demonstrate the grave damage he had done.

Murrow later acknowledged ruefully that he should have confronted McCarthy sooner. Nor was he responsible for bringing him down: that distinction belongs, in varying degrees, to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, so incensed that “Tail Gunner Joe” was going after the institution to which Ike had devoted himself the last four decades—the military—that he employed behind-the-scenes surrogates like Richard Nixon to undercut him; and then-Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who carefully marshalled the votes leading to the censure of McCarthy by his colleagues a half-year later.

But Murrow did bring the resources of the still-fledgling medium of television journalism to extremely controversial subject matter, and—for all his initial caution in finally taking on McCarthy—he never walked it back or stilled his voice thereafter, and survived the senator’s subsequent attempt to smear him on camera.

The broadcast aired despite deep concern shading into disapproval by CBS brass, including company head William S. Paley. Only two months before the broadcast, American public opinion still ran half in favor of McCarthy and only 29% against, according to a Gallup poll. Paley feared that he would lose the sponsor of See It Now, Alcoa--and, in fact, that company did not renew their contract with CBS.

Yet in the wake of that show, followed by an ineffectual rebuttal by the Senator and Murrow’s unflinching denial of McCarthy’s attempt to smear him, responses ran 15-1 in favor of Murrow, according to Jim Willis’ 100 Media Moments that Changed America.

That night, Murrow took on what had troubled his journalist colleagues: how to bring the American public face to face with a demagogue of unparalleled recklessness, cupidity and cruelty. That same dilemma has become an overriding concern of today’s journalists as well, as they try to report, news that Donald Trump would rather not hear. 

For a long time, I did not believe that the conditions were right in America for the appearance of another Joe McCarthy. But in the last few years, the conviction has hardened in me that Trump is not only McCarthy’s natural successor, but in certain ways is even worse. 

McCarthy, after all, had to content himself with the not-inconsiderable powers given to Senators to conduct hearings on matters that call for legislation. Trump, though, has the full power of the Presidency behind him. 

Moreover, alcoholism not only hastened McCarthy’s descent from influence and ensured he would not make a comeback, but sped him to an early death, at age 48, from cirrhosis of the liver. On the other hand, Trump—with older brother Fred as a warning example—has avoided substance abuse.

The greatest factor differentiating Trump from McCarthy, however, derives from Trump’s fortune. No other occupant of the Oval Office has ever combined the inherent powers of this position with the financial resources of a billionaire—commercial influence he has continued to wield even after entering the White House.

It is rich indeed that Trump has decried the Mueller investigation as a “Witch hunt” and an example of “McCarthyism” in his daily tweets, for reasons going back the oft-noted fact that his friend and attorney when he was just starting out was Roy Cohn, who in his youth had been McCarthy’s chief counsel. 

Trump hopes that the longtime understanding of “McCarthyism”—i.e., guilt by association—will work wonders with followers who see nothing wrong with hanging out with Russians. But the term  also represents charges sprayed out indiscriminately, without a shred of evidence, even contradictory at points. When proof is requested of the politician, he offers distraction rather than evidence. 

Thus, McCarthy, in the event bringing him to the world stage, saying he had “in my hands a list of 205 names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party,” kept changing the number. Thus Trump, having made a big splash with GOP voters by calling for Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate to prove he was a U.S. citizen, eventually not only admitted that Obama was, but ludicrously suggested that the falsehood had been spread by Hilary Clinton rather than himself. 

In other respects, the press in both cases found it difficult to pierce the veil of lies woven by the Senator and the President:

*Each had a strong right-wing media “amen corner.” The Hearst organization enjoyed a direct link to McCarthy through Cohn and the latter’s close young friend, David Schine; Trump enjoys the near-total support of Fox News.

*GOP colleagues on Capitol Hill started out believing they could use McCarthy and Trump for their own purposes, only to crumble spinelessly when he influenced the party faithful against anyone who spoke out against him. In 1950, "growing numbers of Republicans were convinced that McCarthyism was their ticket to political power," wrote Thomas C. Reeves in his 1982 biography, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy. They were right in that assumption, but wrong in believing that they could simply use him with no danger to themselves. After seeing McCarthy help defeat a critic, conservative Democrat Millard Tydings, Republican senators were terrified of taking him on. Similarly, even Republicans who harshly criticized Trump during the primaries, such as Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz, have fallen in line after witnessing the rank-and-file’s support of the President.

*The menace of physical assault hung in the air around journalists covering the demagogue. McCarthy’s assault on muckraker Drew Pearson was so shockingly brutal (a knee to the groin, followed by a slap) that it even met with disapproval by otherwise sympathetic conservative historian Arthur Herman; Trump merely excites crowds against journalists such as Katy Tur, or praises a congressman (Greg Gianforte, R-Mont.) for pummeling a reporter.

In dealing with McCarthy, Murrow had to depart from one of the tenets of journalism—objectivity. His “Report” would not be a “he said, they said,” point-counterpoint presentation of points of view. He was reporting in a way that left no doubt whatsoever how he felt about what he called the Senator’s “methods.” 

Contemporary journalists face a not-dissimilar problem with Trump. His relationship to the truth has been so casual that they have increasingly transitioned how they process his claims. Early in his White House, stories would say that Trump's claims were "without evidence." Now, they are increasingly calling these outright "falsehoods." But as this reporting becomes more aggressive, it leaves the media open to being called by the President "enemies of the people."

They would do well to go back to Murrow's original broadcast.  

Though most of his report used McCarthy’s words against him, the closing was in Murrow's own words. Unlike in much of today's journalism, whether from the right or left, a tone of sobriety infuses the message and raises it to a level of eloquence virtually unimaginable now. The words are as searing to read as to listen to and watch:

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. 

“This is no time for men who oppose Senator [Joseph] McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. 

“We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. 

“And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’"