I am sure he has long forgotten it but Hertzberg deserves a prescience award for offering the earliest published debunking of Judith M. Miller, long before her work at the Times. This was in an unsigned (but see below) New Yorker Talk of the Town item, from 1973, called "News on a Shoestring.".
The writer praised the Pacifica Foundation's New York radio station, WBAI, for its nightly Vietnam program. He conceded one exception: Vapid reports from that same foundation's Washington bureau, echoing what everyone else in the capital was filing. The bureau's lead reporter then? "Judy Miller," en route to NPR and the Times and notorious gullibility during the run-up to the second Iraq war.
"News on a Shoestring" caused me inadvertent injury (unrelated to Miller), so circa 1978 I decided to make a stab at learning who had written it. Michael Arlen tipped me to the existence of a permanent ledger containing the New Yorker's unpublished author credits. "Hendrik Hertzberg," the magazine's library wrote back. Hertzberg and I briefly chatted by telephone, totally without reference to Miller's 1973 shortcomings.
But from the vantage point of 2007, what a marvelous flash-forward Hertzberg offered in that ancient item, carping about an obscure Washington reporter's radio reports about a war.
I am sure he has long forgotten it but Hertzberg deserves a prescience award for offering the earliest published debunking of Judith M. Miller, long before her work at the Times. This was in an unsigned (but see below) New Yorker Talk of the Town item, from 1973, called "News on a Shoestring.".
The writer praised the Pacifica Foundation's New York radio station, WBAI, for its nightly Vietnam program. He conceded one exception: Vapid reports from that same foundation's Washington bureau, echoing what everyone else in the capital was filing. The bureau's lead reporter then? "Judy Miller," en route to NPR and the Times and notorious gullibility during the run-up to the second Iraq war.
"News on a Shoestring" caused me inadvertent injury (unrelated to Miller), so circa 1978 I decided to make a stab at learning who had written it. Michael Arlen tipped me to the existence of a permanent ledger containing the New Yorker's unpublished author credits. "Hendrik Hertzberg," the magazine's library wrote back. Hertzberg and I briefly chatted by telephone, totally without reference to Miller's 1973 shortcomings.
But from the vantage point of 2007, what a marvelous flash-forward Hertzberg offered in that ancient item, carping about an obscure Washington reporter's radio reports about a war.