She was gallant, even heroic, in forcing the case for women in journalism. That was a monumental career achievement. She got herself admired for bold, relentless badgering of Presidents. She became the first woman president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. She quit UPI on principle when the Moonies bought it in 2000 (and signed on as a columnist for Hearst) In recent years (she is now 89) she has been receiving special deference for longevity. (Disclosure: At 86, I personally disavow professional envy).

But she was also, in what was then the era of objectivity as a professional objective, a subversive precursor of the prejudicial slant in reporting that has come to characterize the worst in the shrill polemicists in the blogosphere and cable news. And, like them, she got a lot of personal attention, admiration for scrappiness — and celebrity status.

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post did a fine retrospective this week of some of those breaches that were more or less passed over as loud odd-ball eccentricities at the time. Mark Knoller of CBS told him:: “She asked questions no hard-news reporter would ask, that carried an agenda and reflected her point of view, and there were some reporters who felt that was inappropriate.” To one such diatribe, Tony Snow thanked her for “the Hezbollah view.” “She always said crazy stuff,” Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online columnist recalled: “This newfound horror and dismay that people are expressing about Helen Thomas are beyond a day late and a dollar short.”

There is some irony in the response of the Board of the White House Correspondents Association, in their concern over her assigned seat, front and center, in the briefing room:

Many in our profession who have known Helen for years were saddened by her comments, which were especially unfortunate in light of her role as a trail-blazer on the White House beat. While Helen has not been a member of the WHCA for many years, her special status in the briefing room has helped solidify her as the dean of the White House press corps, so we feel the need to speak out strongly on this matter.

Consequently they are considering the appropriateness of a columnist being assigned to a front-row seat.

So her outrageous outburst on Israel may be startling, but in full career context it is not a real surprise. It sheds harsh light on the false premise of her fame as a journalist, and the adulation, respect — and the front-and-center seat in the White House briefing room — that it brought.

Who can afford them? Along with the other costly paragons of journalistic excellence, the investigative reporters, in this new era of newspapers folding, bureaus closing, layoffs, and stifling cost controls? Hamilton quotes Donald Graham, Chairman of the Washington Post: “Sending reporters overseas costs lots of money and doesn’t add a penny to this year’s circulation or advertising revenue.” In November, Graham closed the Post’s domestic bureaus in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

“All news must be subsidized,” Hamilton finds. The traditional subsidy in the case of a mass-market newspaper or network television newscast has come mostly from advertisers (they typically have accounted for 75 percent of newspapers’ incomes). This approach supported foreign news relatively well when newspapers and broadcasters bundled together a wide array of news and entertainment in order to appeal to as many people as possible. Readers and viewers who didn’t want foreign news got some anyway along with the stuff they did want, he acknowledges. Advertisers liked this approach because it brought them large audiences of consumers for their products. But with the unbundling of the news package, in what Jack Fuller of the Chicago Tribune in 2002 described as “the ongoing fragmentation of the information environment,” the audience and the advertisers have migrated to whatever niches suited them best – and which generated survival revenues. “All traditional news delivery is imperiled because of this,” Hamilton writes. Inside the bundle, profits from the larger constituencies would cover the costs for the sections of higher institutional value and lower commercial appeal; now they don’t.

“The big question is: Who’s going to do the original news gathering?” Hamilton wonders in an interview, over the phone from Baton Rouge. “Who’s going to go out and find out stuff we don’t know? The more papers cut back on staff, the less enterprise reporting they can do and the less stuff they are going to find out. Somebody’s going to have to pick up that slack.”
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To pick it up, he contends, “Subsidies must come from elsewhere.” He got a good idea of where when he sat in on a news meeting of the Center for Public Integrity (whose annual budgets of $5-6 million are covered by a mix of foundation grants and fundraising). “I was just blown away by the amount of really good stuff they are doing” — The Global Climate Change Lobby; Ginnie Mae’s Troubling Endorsements; Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrating Search for Justice; The Transportation Lobby; The Murtha Method. “I thought, that’s great, so I asked who pays for it. The answer: None of them. All of this has to be financed by philanthropy.”

Foundations like the Center and Knight have been funding specific projects, generously, and getting important, consequential stories into print and on the air, for years; Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald’s magnate Ray Kroc, made a $235 million bequest to National Public Radio in November, 2003;. ProPublica started in the fall of 2007 on a $10 million grant, primarily from the Herbert and Marion Sandler Foundation, and there has been an accelerating expansion of organizations and individuals contributing to prop-ups or start-ups in the weakening business of news.

“Much more of this can be done,” but for such efforts to be successful, Hamilton warns “donors will have to jettison a common assumption that funding should be temporary and that ventures can be self-supporting. Like parks, soup kitchens, local opera, and educational institutions, high-quality media rarely pays for itself.”

Proprietors never did consider themselves as running “eleemosynary institutions,” he concedes, even though, in their investing in the public good of excellent journalism, they were. Now it appears that, perforce, out and out philanthropy is having to do it.

Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism. Read more about him here.

40s

The news business came out of World War II a lot like the rest of the country: proud and confident. More than eyewitnesses, we were cheerleaders, too, rooters for our winning team, with our own stars: Ernie Pyle, Bill Mauldin, Ed Murrow. We trusted our victorious leaders, and even our allies, as we reported on the founding of the United Nations, and for a while eased into a routine of conventional reporting.

But not for very long.

50s

The Cold War started; the Iron Curtain had clanged down, and serious policy questions broke out;. Korea took everyone by surprise; MacArthur saved it, over reached, crossed Harry Truman, got himself fired, returned to a hero’s welcome, made a big speech, and then really did, in his own words, fade away. For the first time in years, the press was called upon to report big public controversy — still primarily in print in its traditional straightforward, structured, apparently objective way.

Joe McCarthy changed all that. He bluffed and bullied a gullible, non-challenging press into accomplices for his rampage of scare-charges of Communist subversives in government that ruined careers and wrecked, among others, the Far East sector of the State Department. This turned out to be an object lessen on press responsibility, only belatedly learned and courageously corrected by growing awareness and counter challenges, culminating in Ed Murrow’s devastating presentation of the Senator, live, in his own words.

Television started to emerge as a powerful force for institutional change, primarily as a diversion of advertising dollars, and the ultimate destruction of the evening newspapers. With the rare pioneering exceptions of fine documentaries like Murrow and Fred Friendly‘s Harvest of Shame, and attempts at meaningful public debates, and the pageantry of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, TV news was pretty much an extension of print; mostly confined to 15 minutes of Douglas Edwards and John Cameron Swayze, reading. The Nixon-Kennedy debate, though, crossed the great divide for TV news, to relevance and importance. People who heard it thought Nixon won; people who saw it, thought Kennedy won. Visual would become the primary force in journalism (as immediacy would soon become its partner).

60s

The shattering events of the 60s changed journalism, and journalists, in range and responsibilities, identity and attitude. The assassinations created an unprecedented climate of urgency, expectation, and existential uncertainty among consumers of the news; words and pictures of the riots created an intimacy with shock. In that context the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby on live TV is the historic flash point. People saw history actually happen.

Coverage of the struggle for civil rights, though, brought about the most fundamental change in journalism, as events like sit-ins; live pictures of the beatings of Freedom Riders; Bull Connor, fire hoses, and police dogs at Pettus Bridge changed the attitudes of the nation, their expectations from journalism, and the role of reporters from observers to sympathizers. They became engaged in their stories, and as they did, erased the ephemeral claim to objectivity.

Politics turned rough, at least partly to exploit the divisiveness and fear. Cops and dissenters turned the 1968 Democratic Convention into a near-riot, including the arrest and formal removal of reporters from the floor. Spiro Agnew railed against Nattering Nabobs of Negativism. SDS spawned the underground press, with publications like the LA Free Press and the Berkeley Barb. Tom Wolfe led the way into the highly subjective New Journalism, and Teddy White set new standards for depth and understanding in political reporting.

The news business explored new ranges, less violent, to report. Rachel Carson opened the way to environmental reporting with Silent Spring; Betty Friedan to gender politics with The Feminine Mystique. Hugh Hefner offered the idea of Playboy to Hearst, which turned him down; he went on to do it himself. Cosmopolitan hired Helen Gurley Brown, the editor who turned sex (and eventually prurience) into an overwhelming global publishing commodity.

70s

Advances in applications of technology shaped the news business. Creation of the satellite and the advent of cable enabled Ted Turner to stitch together the Superstation, which made fans of the Atlanta Braves across the country, and got him the money and new skills, to go with his genius gumption, to start CNN – all news, all the time, all over the world. HBO made the first global real-time show of a major event with the Thrilla in Manila (Ali-Frazier), and became the first TV network to continuously deliver signals via satellite.

Publication of the Pentagon Papers, essentially an academic exercise, was an enormous historic advance — and a very brave one — in the affirmation of the press’s duty to challenge authority. Watergate, only months later, equally historic, equally brave, was an essentially professional journalistic exercise — advancing in practice from basic shoe-leather reporting to “follow the money” — to the same end. “At the beginning, I don’t think Kay Graham and Ben Bradlee had the foggiest notion of what it would turn into,” recalls one competitor from that time. “It was just very good reporting, and it drove us nuts.”

At the same time, challenge to authority was being expressed in Viet Nam, where reporters — professional descendants of the proud eyewitnesses of earlier wars — held official pronouncements in contempt. They came to call the daily briefings The Five O’Clock Follies; Harrison Salisbury reported from Hanoi; Sy Hersh reported the My Lai massacre; and Walter Cronkite’s commentary famously caused Lyndon Johnson to concede that this was a war he could not win.

Affirmations of basic principle aside, historic adjustments were being made on the commercial and operational sides. Newspapers were losing their near-monopolistic claim to revenue from news. Families, once proud and comfortable in their stewardship, were finding the capital costs of keeping up, the threat to future profits, and generational dissent, all creating good reasons to sell to money-minded chains , where reality dictated that cost control weighed heavily against pricey journalism..

News was growing into a powerful money-maker for TV, and producing star-wattage personalities, who were making a lot of that money for themselves. The defining event was the hiring of Barbara Walters from NBC by ABC for the first million-dollar contract for a journalist, and altered many a career objective.

80s

The Reagan years were big for news, with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, Iran Contra, and the Challenger disaster, but a lot less dramatic for the media business itself.

Less dramatic, yes, but powerfully significant for the quality of reporting that: the enormous range and capacity for research created. The Internet was just getting started, and the organizing of research into ready accessibility, was making instantly available unprecedented depth and quality of fact, context, and interpretation.

90s

It was a fat time for television, where news as entertainment brought in new highs in profit, and made millionaire celebrities of its stars. Crossfire began, and talking heads became loud, shrill, and profitably entertaining.

The task of filling the giant 24/7 hole with news stretched severely thin the quality of journalism, though. For all its value, the Internet’s capability to move things quickly without full sourcing and to distribute them widely, facilitated the deterioration. The need to fill the hole invited superficiality and scandal, opened space for wild opinionating, put a premium on commentary over reporting, created a preference for anticipation and intolerance for explanation. The O.J. Simpson murder trial set the scandal meter at an all-time high – until the Clinton scandals overtook it, and made Drudge the dominant personality in the media world. Historic, in a way. Washington reporters wondered why the reporting on sex scandals was wide open now, when as recently as Jack Kennedy, it was simply not done.

The newspaper world obsessed with figuring out how to get back the revenues they lost to Craig’s List, and many of them could not. Real panic started to set in. Preparations began for the Aughts and dark days to come of layoffs, buyouts, and closings. Technologists — masters of the new universe of algorithms — got ready to take over.

And they did.

I did not quote anyone by name, except for Paul Starr, but I would like to acknowledge the great help from the following, in preparation of this post: Paul Starr, Stephen Engelberg, Ralph Engelman, Charles Bierbauer, Bob Semple, Alex Jones, John Darnton, Rachel Rich Fine, Geneva Overholser, Elliot King, Sidney Offitt, .Jim Srodes, Tom Fleming and Geoff Smith.

Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism. Read more about him here.

But this guy is different. What troubles me the most about him is how he is slopping over into the new journalism. He implores his devotees to go out and dig up dirt on enemies of his current true beliefs — a new organizing principle for the swamp of citizen journalists, with himself in the new role of assignment editor for the curious, angry and fearful. For those who are troubled over the lack of judgment, filters, and discipline in the handling of the new spontaneous news flows, this careless call-out represents a new reach into chaos for the profession.

“At a time when the news business continues to rate very low on the scales of trust, how can confidence be regained by its use of demonstrably untrustworthy methods?”

Yet isn’t it part of the hope for the interactive new journalism, that we reach out more and more to the readers/viewers/listeners of the news, for their contributions to it and engagement with it? Many important stories have begun with tips from frustrated non-journalists — specialists, enthusiastic amateurs, vigilantes, outraged insiders. Now Beck is of a mind to turn a crowd of solo whistle-blowers, each subject to some careful evaluation, into a wild cacophony of loud-hailers, undiscernible. Which may, worryingly, embolden the news business to use this method as a new way to prove its value.

It certainly got results with ACORN — the blast from Beck touched off by the reporting of non-journalists got action from Congress, which had been desultory in its inquiries into the charges against it. And what do you think would have happened if Harry Markapolis had blown his whistle through Glenn Beck, instead of huffing and puffing to the SEC about Bernard Madoff? That could be good. But what happens when he megaphones a bad call? Who can clean up the mess? Not him, for sure.

Yes, editors and reporters have made bad calls and failed to report properly, but the system as a whole, through their peers and colleagues, calls them to account, and the record gets set straight. But a non-correcting hit-and-run system of aroused like-minded amateurs can’t get that job done.

Another main thing that bothers me about Beck is his revelation of the risk of using non-professionals to make his point. The two neophytes who blew up ACORN bit on a lie — the woman who confessed to murder — even as they brought out truth in the advice they got in how to set up a whorehouse for underaged illegal aliens. Sting operations have been vital to the start of many an important story, up to and including members of Congress; but the Glenn Beck exposés are downright scary in their demonstration of the risks they pose in the hands of zealous non-professionals.

At a time when the news business continues to rate very low on the scales of trust, how can confidence be regained by its use of demonstrably untrustworthy methods? Sure, a juicy scandal fully reported will win plaudits from the winners; but a blown case will rightly confirm the doubters. And over time, the engagement in journalism of a slob job like Beck will do nothing to advance the appreciation of high standards and professionalism in presenting the issues for public deliberation — as the news business strains for ways to advance within its charter for public responsibility, in its kaleidoscopic new world, and will assuredly set it back a lot.

Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism and writes the Old Guard column for Mediaite. Read more about him here.

He has been famously quoted that “everything we did was for the first time.”  True enough. His historic contribution to the new world of news, though, is that he set, affirmed,  and visibly maintained permanent professional standards by doing it so well.   It took a while before appreciation of these homely virtues of diligence, dispassionate judgment and integrity came to focus on him as personal exemplar among the pantheon of great reporters, as TV rose as a  primary dispenser of news to the public.

He did not emerge right away as the brightest star in the new firmament. His rivals were great journalists, well received. Huntley and Brinkley were ahead in the ratings, and Cronkite, who had  started to anchor the national conventions in 1952, was replaced for the 1964 Republican convention in 1964.   His replacement team was a flop, and he was  put back in charge for the Democratic convention that followed. It was not until 1967 that Huntley and Brinkley finally ceded their ratings leadership, and Cronkite officially assumed his position as  the nation’s familiar, almost publicly certified, guardian and spokesman for truth and  trust.

As an old UPI wire service reporter  from Houston — and a veteran of bombing raids over Europe — he managed to stay away from personal involvement in  opinion and controversy,  even as he brought his judgment into play as Managing Editor of the CBS evening news. But in the exercise of that judgment, he eventually,  famously, emerged as a commentator in February, 1968, when he pronounced, after a reporting tour in Vietnam, that the U.S. could not win the war. Lyndon Johnson conceded later that when Cronkite made that public judgment, he knew he’d lost America’s support. That might have been the time when Cronkite lost his cachet for objectivity and journalistic trust.

Events have continued to  chip away at those admirable virtues and values.  The media has splattered into almost infinite forms and purposes — attitudes, profits, technology, personalities. There was a wonderful singularity among Cronkite and his colleagues. But they were focused on the great purpose — the news, and its importance to the people. Nothing else mattered. They were not cynical about compromise in presentation, or corporate concern about profit, or how to play a hot-shot new technological  invention.

Great reporters still believe, and act.  But the institutional resolve seems to be fading.

I do not mourn the death of Walter Cronkite.  I mourn the fog of fading memory of the importance and purpose of the great  straight reporting, which he so nobly did.

Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism. Read more about him here.

In the hard new priorities of news management, dwindling resources struggle to keep coverage alive on essential routine beats, while the public-interest side of the business — investigative journalism,  the very heart and soul of journalism — is being unforgivably squeezed in the face of fiscal realities.

So, how to pay for the vital probings on behalf of the entire polity, in this time of forced deprivation?  Philanthropy, perhaps?  The success of the pioneer ProPublica — the non-profit independent newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest, with “moral force” — bodes well.

Launched last year, ProPublica is funded by a multi-year, $10 million budget from the Herbert and Marion Sandler Foundation, supported by the MacArthur Foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and the Kohlberg Foundation, with pro bono counsel support from Cleary Gottlieb and Davis Wright Tremaine. It is led by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Stephen Engelberg, former  managing editor of the Portland Oregonian and investigative editor of the New York Times. Their staff consists of  32 top-flight journalists (eight of them winners of Pulitzers), individually and collectively way beyond the pay scales of the publications they seek to serve. They range wide over their specialties, find leads, investigate, research, and produce original stories — which they offer exclusively, free, to the local news organizations where they will have the most impact.

From a standing start, they have done a spectacular job. ProPublica has already provided more than 40 publishing partners with original  reports of consequence.  One on the environmental damage caused by hydrofracking — the practice of injecting toxic fluids underground in the process of natural gas drilling — was picked up by the Albany Times-Union, Business Week, the Denver Post, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The story has touched off a fierce debate in Congress over  extension of  the extraordinary legal exemption for the practice.

Another, on California’s failure to check the criminal backgrounds  of 195,000 health-care professionals, published in the Los Angeles Times, prompted the state Department of Consumer Affairs to add 104,000  professionals from all levels of medical care — doctors, dentists, psychiatric technicians — to that total, and spurred the state into remedial action. ProPublica’s ongoing investigative efforts into the California health care system this week resulted in Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger replacing most of the State Nursing Board.

Elsewhere in the country, ProPublica posted an update on its earlier story published in The Nation about vigilantism in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina:  new video footage has surfaced about one of the murders, in which the police may have been involved.

So far, ProPublica has brought more than 50 similar heretofore secret stories into public view in its first year in business. And counting.

And, apparently, just in time. “We don’t pretend to be a substitute for all the resources that are being lost,” says Dick Tofel, ProPublica’s general manager from its inception. “Many, many millions of dollars, many scores of people. It’s a national tragedy. We can’t fix that by ourselves, but we can push back, and perhaps ultimately serve as one model  for how you can build a non-profit news organization that may be replicable, for instance, at the local or regional level around the country.”

Tofel’s sense of urgency comes from what he perceives to be the core of “investigative journalism,” as he defines it: “It is the stories that someone in some position of power wants to keep secret. What investigative journalism is about is getting those stories that people in some position of power want to keep from being told. If one can accept that definition, then I think one can quickly understand why it is a very important function of self government.”

Tofel cites David Simon, former journalist and creator of The Wire on HBO, whose comments while testifying before Congress earlier this year at the “Future of Journalism” hearing echoed around the industry:  “The next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption.“

Well, not if ProPublica can help it. Tofel, Steiger and Engelberg aim to be around for those 10 to 15 years, and then some. “We all agree it’s an integrated whole: If you just do great content it’s not enough; if you just have great staff it’s not enough; if you just have distribution it’s not enough,” says Tofel. “It’s a system you need to build; it’s a machine you need to construct, and then to maintain on the fly.”

To that end, they are building it. First priority:  recruit and retain a first-rate staff.  (“Very pleased about that,” says Tofel. “Not 100 percent done, but close.”) Indeed: Pro Publica just added Jesse Eisinger, formerlyof Portfolio and the Wall Street Journal, and this past spring added online and organizing savvy with Amanda Michel, the former director of “Off The Bus,” the Huffington Post’s citizen journalism arm. Second priority: Do great work. Tofel is modest (“I think we’ve started to do some, but we need to do years of it  before people can start assessing”), but the California State Nursing Board might beg to differ.  Third: Distribute effectively. No need for modesty there. Says Tofel:  “We’ve already proven that.”

With work of such incredible public value, it seems almost depressing that it traditional business models can’t support it. But, says Tofel, that’s why now is the time to shake things up. “I think we’re at a moment of cataclysmic change here; there’s a need for a lot of real experimentation,” he says. “I do think that philanthropy can catalyze a lot of experimentation that needs to be done. We are about to get more systematic about what a sustainable long-term funding model would look like and go out to try to build one. I have more questions than answers about that, very honestly. I don’t have answers.  All I will tell you is that we’ve been publishing just a year now, and I think this is the next big thing for us to do.”

Like the rest of their investigations, we look forward to the results.

Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism. Read more about him here.

The Missile Gap. A vital issue in the Kennedy-Nixon campaign of  1960. Kennedy warned, vigorously and essentially unchallenged, that the Soviet strategic nuclear arsenal was significantly more powerful than ours, and the gap was growing wider every day. Eisenhower and Nixon  protested in vain that the gap was a fiction. The Kennedy claim prevailed, and turned out to be a powerful  force in the Democratic victory. One of McNamara’s first jobs as Secretary of Defense in the new administration was to measure that gap.  He did. In a matter of weeks he reported: Yes. There was a gap. In our favor. By a wide margin.  Why the shocking, and politically consequential mis-call? Bad intelligence,  provided by the CIA, exploited by political campaigners, unquestioned by journalists.

Lesson for the media today: Why didn’t we learn from that one — not be suckered again, by the CIA and the exploiters  of the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction?

The Bay of Pigs. Kennedy and McNamara were handed the fully-developed  project for anti-Castro Cubans to launch an attack from American bases, to overthrow the dictator.  McNamara wanted to stop it, but could not. Media lore has it clear that the New York Times had gotten word of the preparations, and was ready to break the story. Kennedy urged Scotty Reston to persuade the editors of  the Times to hold back on the story, which the Times did. The project proceeded to disaster. Much debate over morals, philosophy, and responsibility over the years.

Lesson for the media today: Always the toughest: Duty, loyalty, responsibility. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t (depending on the unforeseeable consequences).  cf: Patriot Act unlicensed wiretaps. You can only do your best, but duty, loyalty and responsibility are good guides.

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Johnson claimed, falsely, that one August night in 1964, U.S. warships off the coast had been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats. McNamara supported the President’s claim, based on  signals intelligence, which turned out to be too raw to be accurate.  The President used the episode to support his case for the Declaration of War by the Senate; he won, 99-1 (Wayne Morse, D-OR, was the sole dissenter).

Lesson for the media today: Impossible in the new world of Twitters and the internet. Important sidebar:  In the constant intelligence quest for human intelligence to bolster signals intelligence, humint has gained a powerful new resource in  its constant balancing act with sigint.

Dominican Republic. Over McNamara’s objections, Johnson accepted CIA assurance that “Communist conspirators” were trying to create another Communist government in the Dominican Republic, and sent in 24,000 troops to squelch the revolt. Turned out the Communists had nothing to do with a local insurrection, but subsequent realization of the falsehood  led the press for the first time to identify a “credibility gap,” which conditioned coverage, for good and bad, of the whole Vietnam war that followed.

Lesson for the media today: Remember it

The Pentagon Papers. McNamara, in personal agony and doubt about the purpose and performance of the war, commissioned the top-secret history. It was completed in 1968, and leaked in full to the New York Times in 1971.  Times house counsel James Goodale prevailed over strenuous  objections by outside counsel, on the grounds that the press had a First Amendment right to publish information significant to the people’s understanding of their government’s policy, and the series went to press that June.

Lesson for the media today: Remember it.

*****

Marking the markers: Errol Morris, in his McNamara film biography , The Fog of War; and Tim Weiner, in his New York Times obituary, made clear the significance of McNamara’s various impacts upon the practice of journalism in this country.