Witnessing and Reporting

The death of Tom Wicker on November 25 is slightly old news, but a reminder of a (sometimes) better era of journalism.

The media being "professional" as it is, coverage focused on shop talk—along the lines of, "reporting the Kennedy assasination made his career."

Less prominent was the fact that Wicker's career at the NYT included taking stands on issues. Among those mentioned by Robert D. McFadden, in the Times' obituary—

He denounced President Richard M. Nixon for covertly bombing Cambodia, and in the Watergate scandal accused him of creating the "beginnings of a police state."

...

...Speaking at a 1971 "teach-in" at Harvard, he urged students to "engage in civil disobedience" in protesting the war in Vietnam. "We got one president out," he told the cheering crowd, "and perhaps we can do it again."

He was among the observers who tried to mediate during the Attica uprising, before New York governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the fatal storming of the prison.

His writings on civil rights reflected a topic of deep concern to the North Carolina native.

McFadden notes another subject among Wicker's books—

"On Press" (1978) enlarged on complaints he had made for years: the myth of objectivity, reliance on official and anonymous sources. Far from being robust and uninhibited, he wrote, the press was often a toady to government and business.

And Wicker noted the central Reagan scam; Thom Hartmann often cites this 1985 column—

... it now appears the deficit was deliberately created by Mr. Reagan in order to do away with Democratic social programs dating back to the New Deal.

Who says so? David Stockman, the departing Budget Director, at second hand, and Friedrich von Hayek directly. He's the Nobel Prize-winning economist who's been a guru of Reaganomics.

Wicker's warning still rings horribly true—"Congressional Democrats should realize the source of the pressure they're under to sell their political birthright."

Now, that could have been written yesterday—to fall again on predominately deaf ears.