D.D. Guttenplan on I.F. Stone, Peter Richardson on Ramparts

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DATE : Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:00:00 +0100
Entered in Database : 2010-01-01 05:00:00
length : 13463300
Link to the Show / Show Notes

This week on CounterSpin: Some of the current conversations about the future of journalism trade on some pretty rose-colored notions of journalism’s past. The reality is journalism has always been a very mixed bag, with just some reporters doing the challenging, talking truth to power work that later generations may imagine Everyone was doing. This week on the show we’re going to take a look back at a couple critical institutions in the history of what we now think of as investigative journalism – the sort of hardhitting, independent reporting current discussion is focused on ‘saving’. One of those institutions was actually a person – I.F. Stone. Stone wasn’t just among the greatest American investigative reporters, he was also an activist and a man of the left. Earlier this year, CounterSpin spoke with D.D. Guttenplan, author of the latest biography of the journalist, American Radical: the Life and Times of I.F. Stone. Because he challenged U.S. power, often just by reporting the contents of official documents, and because he was a leftist, Stone's reputation has been under assault by vestigial McCarthyites who have been claiming for decades that he was a Soviet agent. Guttenplan discussed those charges, and Stone’s actual ideas, in this interview about a man whose story, even after his death, has much to tell us about U.S. media and politics. Also on the show: Ramparts magazine has also been important even to people who never read it. Originally a small literary magazine pitched to the "mature American Catholic," Ramparts became a rollicking left-wing muckraking enterprise that exposed CIA misdeeds and Vietnam War lies and atrocities. Contributors to Ramparts resemble a who's who of progressive journalism and the American left, including Angela Davis, Seymour Hersh and Robert Scheer to name a few. The story of Ramparts rise and fall, and its impact on US journalism, is told in a new book, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America. CounterSpin spoke with author Peter Richardson. A little media history, this week on CounterSpin.