Who's the Journalistic Hypocrite?

Whenever liberals moan about the sorry state of American print journalism, I'm reminded of A.J. Liebling, the great New Yorker press critic of the 1950s and '60s, who remarked that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

The same goes for quality. You want free-thinking, courageous reporting, unpolluted by government intimidation and big money interests? I'm afraid that in a country hooked on private enterprise, it's the special privilege of owners to hire good journalists and encourage them to do honest work. Get used to it or else get busy raising a billion dollars to start your own daily newspaper. Meanwhile, you're free to blog yourself silly (or shout out the window).

Granted, the increase in corporate ownership of newspapers and magazines has muddied the question of who actually controls the press, but there's usually still a dominant shareholder to hold accountable, be it Rupert Murdoch at News Corp. or Donald Graham at the Washington Post Co. Blame Murdoch, not Judith Regan, for the O.J. confession debacle; blame Graham for any number of sins committed by Bob Woodward.

Nevertheless, we shouldn't absolve individual reporters of all responsibility for journalistic malpractice. There was nothing preventing James Risen of the New York Times from breaking his big, suppressed scoop about President Bush's illegal National Security Agency wiretapping program before the November 2004 election. Just because his bosses at the Times were too cautious to print the story promptly (they waited more than a year) doesn't mean that Risen couldn't have gotten the story printed elsewhere—in time, perhaps, to drive Bush from office.

Likewise, nothing compelled Nicholas Lemann, a noted author and dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, to write his shoddy, disingenuous appraisal of the left-wing journalist I.F. Stone, published in the New Yorker last November. As unfair as it was, Lemann's piece got me thinking again about Liebling's dictum, not only because I admired Stone's journalism, but because Stone took Liebling to heart. When his last newspaper was shot out from under him in the early 1950s, Stone started his own newsletter and himself became an owner.

Which makes Lemann's article all the more disturbing, since it runs down Stone's reputation under cover of the “The Wayward Press” rubric—the very moniker that Liebling made famous when the New Yorker was an independent and liberal magazine that regularly took on the conglomerate media.

Everything in Lemann's piece is hedged, including the snide and highly conditional praise. He cites, with a yawn, what he calls the “official catechism” on Stone: “courageous”; “stood up for civil liberties”; “an impassioned advocate of civil rights” for blacks before it was popular; “opposed the Vietnam War well before the Gulf of Tonkin incident”; “aggressively questioned the government at a time when the best-known journalists were cheerleaders,” etc. Lemann acknowledges Stone's “dazzling mind” and “erudition,” and then with faint condescension informs us that “Izzy,” as he was known, was an “excellent, if unconventional, reporter.”

God knows Lemann is a conventional reporter, so in case you didn't know how fatally left Stone was, Lemann makes sure you won't forget it: “Almost all of Stone's serious political disputes involved his being more sympathetic to communism than to whomever he was feuding with”; “Stone had never joined [the Communist Party], but neither had he fully renounced it”; “in incident after incident, over many years, Stone's impulse was to take the side of the Soviet Union and its allies.” In short, an apologist.

Worse, according to Lemann, was Stone's supposed hypocrisy concerning Stalin: Having presented himself as a “moralist with a grand global scope,” Lemann finds that “it seems more than a small oversight that [Stone] mainly missed the story of the greatest mass murderer in history.”

There isn't the space to confront all of Lemann's oversimplifications, biases and errors, but I can mention a couple. For one thing, Stone didn't “mainly miss” the Stalinist terror. As a socialist, he devoted most of his energy to describing fascism, which was clearly the greater offensive threat to European democracy and America in the 1930s and '40s until 1945 (recall “socialism in one country,” Stalin's “betrayal” of worldwide communist revolution).

In fact, Stone was a fairly consistent critic of Stalin, though he remained foolishly optimistic for too long about the prospects for humanistic socialism in pitiless Russia. At worst, wrote a sympathetic biographer, Robert Cottrell, Stone “afford[ed] Russia and even Stalinist communism something of a double standard, fearing that to do otherwise would endanger the Popular Front and the very possibility of socialism.”

Cottrell quotes, for example, a December 1934 column from the then leftish New York Post, in which Stone denounced the Stalinist show-trial convictions and executions of 66 alleged “White Guardists.” Comparing Soviet justice to that of Nazi Germany, Stone assailed the Stalinists for using the same methods employed by “fascist thugs and racketeers.” Perhaps the Bolsheviks were “nervously see[ing] a 'counterrevolutionary' behind every tree as the reactionaries of the capitalist world see a 'Communist' behind every bush.” Stalin, Stone wrote later, was evidently “suffering from the usual hobgoblins that go with absolute power.”

It's not quite fair to judge Stone on his writing about the Soviets during World War II, since almost the entire American political establishment (not to mention FDR's propaganda machine) was promoting the grand alliance with Stalin (suddenly “Uncle Joe”) against Hitler and Mussolini. But by the late 1940s, Russian “Reds” were once again on bad paper in Washington and Stone increasingly resorted to satire to criticize both U.S. anti-communist hysteria and Soviet dogmatism. Proclaiming himself a communist “dupe” for supporting Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate for president in 1948, Stone joked that despite his dupery, his petit bourgeois sensibility reigned supreme: “I own a house in Washington and I don't want proletarians trampling my petunias on their way downtown to overthrow the government by force and violence. I wouldn't want my sister to marry a Communist, and force me to maldigest my Sunday morning bagel arguing dialectics with a sectarian brother-in-law.”

In 1951, as McCarthyism gained steam, Stone baited the red baiters by ridiculing a special issue of Collier's Magazine that envisioned the easy conquest and occupation of the Soviet Union by the West. Stone commented that “a Russian whose head was full of stories about American lynchings and slums—both realities—might well imagine that at the approach of Soviet armies to our shores the Negroes would revolt and the American workers would hail their liberating brothers. An American whose head is full of stories about forced labor camps and secret police—both realities—can well imagine, as the contributors to Collier's imagine, a fervent welcome for the Western armies in the Soviet Union.”

That's not quite covering up for Stalin. Neither was this: “America is in danger of becoming a counter-revolutionary police state in its struggle against a revolutionary police state.”

I imagine that Stone's greater sin in the eyes of Cold Warriors then and now was his illumination of the Stalinist paradox: Here was a truly evil dictator who eventually became the indispensable ally of once-isolationist America and Hitler-appeasing Britain (remember that the Red Army suffered something like 85 percent of allied combat deaths inflicted by the Germans and essentially won the war). More complicated still, awful Uncle Joe apparently treated the persecuted Jews of Europe better, in some respects, than the U.S. State Department, which actually turned back Jewish refugees from American ports.

In Underground to Palestine , his marvelous book about the desperate, clandestine emigration of Jewish survivors of Hitler (the so-called “displaced persons”) to Palestine in 1946, Stone committed another heresy concerning the Evil Empire. Reporting from the Czech-Soviet border, he noted “one striking difference between these Jews from Russia and those pouring into the underground from the European countries which were under Nazi domination or influence. Out of the Soviet Union alone came the miracle of whole Jewish families. Only among these refugees did one see fathers and mothers with children.”

I suppose I'm now at risk of being called an apologist for Stalin. But I must confess that until I read Lemann's article, I thought that Hitler was the greatest mass murderer in history (by which I mean premeditated and direct killing in concentration camps and forest ditches as opposed to, say, starving people to death over months in the Ukraine), or at least running neck and neck with Stalin—and perhaps Mao—as the greatest criminal of all time.

The odd thing about Lemann's piece is that it never once mentions Hitler, or the Hitler apologists here at home and in Mother Britain. It never mentions Joseph Kennedy, Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, Henry Ford, the Cliveden Set, Neville Chamberlain or Oswald Mosley. Lemann does cite Stone's fear that “Fascism was a real, looming possibility” in the U.S. during the Cold War (“he even moved his family to Paris briefly”!) but not Stone's more realistic fear that Hitler, with Mussolini and Franco as subalterns, could well have emerged the master of Europe in 1945.

Was it perhaps Stone's sheer independence that Lemann doesn't like? Was it the move to France?

Or could it be that Lemann “has mainly missed the story of the greatest mass murderer in history”? Hard to believe in so erudite a journalist. But then Lemann doesn't own the New Yorker so maybe it isn't really his fault.

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