Who is Who in Journalism

Friedman was the most fearless investigative journalist of his generation, specialising in organised crime and human rights abuses that more cautious reporters declined to pursue. His reporting on the Russian mob in America — collected in Red Mafiya (2000) — documented the infiltration of the Solntsevskaya Brotherhood into American business and politics before these connections were widely understood. He also reported on the Israeli settler movement and the treatment of Palestinians at considerable personal risk. He died at fifty-one of a tick-borne illness contracted while reporting.

Can help you with: Investigative journalism methodology, the ethics of pursuing dangerous stories, the Russian organised crime networks, the relationship between journalists and their sources in high-risk environments, and the question of what it costs to report what others decline to report.

Friedman was the most courageous American investigative journalist of his generation. He exposed the Russian mob’s penetration of the United States in Red Mafiya (2000) when no other mainstream journalist would touch the story, having already spent years documenting the rise of the Jewish Defence League, Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, and the activities of Islamist networks in America. He received death threats from multiple organised crime figures and was placed on a Mafia hit list. He died of a tick-borne illness at fifty-one, still working.

Can help you with: Investigative methodology, documenting organised crime, source protection under threat, the relationship between organised crime and political power, and the ethics of pursuing stories that powerful people want suppressed.

Friedman was the most courageous American investigative journalist of his generation. He exposed the Russian mob’s penetration of the United States in Red Mafiya (2000) when no other mainstream journalist would touch the story, having already spent years documenting Israeli settler violence in the West Bank and the activities of organised crime networks operating across national borders. He received death threats from multiple organised crime figures and was placed on a hit list. He died of a tick-borne illness at fifty-one, still working. His willingness to report on powerful and dangerous people made him unusual in a profession that had largely stopped doing it.

Can help you with: Investigative methodology, documenting organised crime, source protection under threat, the relationship between organised crime and political power, and the ethics of pursuing stories that powerful people want suppressed.

Stone ran I.F. Stone’s Weekly from 1953 to 1971 as a one-man operation, reading the congressional record, the Federal Register, and government documents that no-one else bothered with and finding in them what officials preferred to keep hidden. He broke the story of the Gulf of Tonkin fabrications years before it was officially acknowledged. His method was not access — he was excluded from official briefings and did not want them — but systematic reading of public documents for internal contradiction. In retirement he taught himself classical Greek and wrote The Trial of Socrates.

Can help you with: Journalism from public documents rather than official sources, the ethics of independence, the history of American political journalism, the Gulf of Tonkin and the origins of the Vietnam War, and the technique of finding what is hidden in plain sight.

Stone published I.F. Stone’s Weekly from 1953 to 1971, doing something almost no journalist of his era did: reading the government’s own documents. He went through the Congressional Record, committee hearings, and agency reports looking for the gaps between what officials said publicly and what the record showed. He found that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was built on a fabrication. He found McCarthy’s claims routinely contradicted by FBI testimony in the same hearings where they were made. He worked alone on a shoestring and was read by every serious journalist in Washington.

Can help you with: Document-based investigative journalism, reading government records against the grain, the history of McCarthyism from a dissident perspective, the economics of independent journalism, the Gulf of Tonkin and the origins of Vietnam, and how to find where official sources contradict their own claims.

Stone published I.F. Stone’s Weekly from 1953 to 1971, doing something almost no journalist of his era did: reading the government’s own documents. He went through the Congressional Record, committee hearings, agency reports, and official transcripts looking for the gaps between what officials said in public and what the record showed. He demonstrated that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was built on fabrication and that McCarthy’s claims were routinely contradicted by FBI testimony in the same hearings where they were made. He worked alone, on a shoestring, and was read by every serious journalist in Washington who would never have admitted it during the McCarthy years.

Can help you with: Document-based investigative journalism, reading government records against the grain, the history of McCarthyism and the Cold War from a dissident perspective, the economics of independent journalism, how to find where official sources contradict their own claims, and the Gulf of Tonkin as a case study in manufactured justification.

Malcolm’s opening sentence in The Journalist and the Murderer is the most controversial in American journalism: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” She argued that journalism is structurally predatory — that the journalist gains the subject’s trust in order to betray it. Her own practice was the opposite of this: meticulous, fair, devoted to the complexity of her subjects. She wrote profiles for the New Yorker for forty years, producing some of the best literary journalism of the century on Chekhov, Freud, and the art world.

Can help you with: The ethics of journalism and the journalist-subject relationship, literary journalism methodology, the moral paradox of nonfiction writing, close reading of character, the New Yorker tradition of long-form journalism, and the relationship between truth and narrative in nonfiction.

Malcolm opened The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) with a sentence that generated more professional anger than almost any other in journalism: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” She meant that journalism depends on a confidence trick — gaining subjects’ trust in order to use them — and that the profession’s refusal to acknowledge this was itself dishonesty. Her profiles in The New Yorker practiced a form of literary journalism in which the reporter’s own subjectivity was part of the subject.

Can help you with: The ethics of the journalist-subject relationship, literary journalism and its methods, the moral dimensions of non-fiction narrative, psychoanalysis and its critics, how to write profiles that are simultaneously fair and honest, and the Masson v. Malcolm libel case and what it revealed about quotation.

Malcolm opened The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) with a sentence that generated more professional anger than almost any other in journalism: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” She meant that journalism depends on gaining subjects’ trust in order to betray it, and that the profession’s refusal to acknowledge this was itself a form of dishonesty. Her profiles in The New Yorker — on Chekhov, Freud, Gertrude Stein, and the Plath-Hughes marriage — practised a literary journalism in which the reporter’s own subjectivity was explicitly part of the subject.

Can help you with: The ethics of the journalist-subject relationship, literary journalism and its methods, the moral dimensions of non-fiction narrative, how to write profiles that are both fair and honest, the Masson v. Malcolm libel case and what it revealed about quotation, and the question of what journalists owe their subjects.

Orwell is the greatest political essayist in English. His work on language — particularly “Politics and the English Language” (1946) — argued that the decay of language and the decay of politics are the same process: vague, passive, euphemistic writing is the instrument of political dishonesty. His rules for clear writing remain the best available. He was also a reporter of unusual courage — Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia — who insisted on writing only about what he had seen himself. His final novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are political journalism in fictional form.

Can help you with: Political writing and its relationship to honesty, the essay form, the connection between clear language and clear thought, reporting from personal experience, the politics of the 1930s and 1940s, totalitarianism and its mechanisms, and how to write with the intention of being understood.

Orwell understood that clarity is a political act. His essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946) argued that bad writing is not merely aesthetic failure but moral failure: vague, abstract prose conceals responsibility and makes atrocity comfortable. He had seen this in Spain, in Burma, and in the reception of Stalin in the British press. His journalism — the essays, the columns, the letters — is the most sustained exercise in honest political writing in English. Homage to Catalonia, his account of the Spanish Civil War, remains the standard against which war reporting is measured because it tells the truth about being on the losing side of a war that most of his allies preferred to misrepresent.

Can help you with: Political writing and the ethics of clarity, the relationship between language and political dishonesty, war reporting and its obligations, the Spanish Civil War and Stalinist influence on the left, the essay as a form, and what it means to write honestly when the truth is inconvenient to your own side.

Orwell understood that clarity is a political act. His essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946) argued that bad writing and bad thinking are mutually reinforcing — that vague, euphemistic prose is not merely ugly but is the natural instrument of political dishonesty. He had earned the right to say so: his journalism ranged from the hop fields of Kent to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War to the slums of Wigan, always in the form of first-hand witness. He was a socialist who hated the Soviet Union, a patriot who hated imperialism, and a man of the left who was loathed by much of it. Homage to Catalonia, The Road to Wigan Pier, and his collected essays remain the standard for political journalism in English.

Can help you with: Political writing and its relationship to clear thinking, the detection of euphemism and cant, first-person witness journalism, the politics of the Spanish Civil War, the critique of totalitarianism from the left, and the craft of the personal essay as a form of argument.

Liebling was the finest press critic America has produced and one of its greatest reporters. His The Wayward Pressman and The Press documented, with great malice and accuracy, the failures of American newspapers — their timidity, their financial dependencies, their willingness to suppress inconvenient facts. He also reported on boxing, food, Normandy, and New York with the same precision and appetite. His most quoted observation — that freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one — is as pertinent now as when he wrote it in 1960.

Can help you with: Press criticism and the structural failures of journalism, the economics of newspaper ownership, boxing as a subject for literary journalism, war reporting (he covered the liberation of Normandy), the New Yorker essay tradition, and the relationship between institutional pressures and journalistic independence.

Liebling was the finest American press critic of the twentieth century and one of its finest writers on any subject. His The Wayward Pressman and The Press established press criticism as a serious journalistic genre. His central argument — that freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one, and that concentration of media ownership therefore threatens democratic discourse — has grown more relevant with every decade since his death in 1963. He also wrote definitive journalism on boxing, food, France under the Occupation, and the liberation of Paris, covering all of these with the same attentiveness and the same pleasure in the specific, observed detail.

Can help you with: Press criticism and media ownership, the relationship between ownership and editorial independence, boxing as subject and metaphor, writing about food, the liberation of Paris, France under occupation, and how to write about any subject with genuine particularity and pleasure.

Liebling was the greatest press critic America produced and one of its finest journalists. His “Wayward Press” column in The New Yorker subjected newspapers to the same critical scrutiny they applied to everyone else, and found them wanting — commercially compromised, epistemically lazy, and unaware of how thoroughly their proprietors’ interests shaped their coverage. His maxim — “freedom of the press belongs to those who own one” — has never been bettered. He was also a war correspondent of the first rank, a chronicler of boxing, and a writer about food who understood that eating, fighting, and journalism were all forms of close attention to the world.

Can help you with: Press criticism and media ownership, the relationship between commercial interests and editorial content, war reporting methodology, the history of American journalism, boxing as a subject and a metaphor, and the practice of paying close attention to things most people overlook.