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Sunday 27 May 2012

Not a role model

Harvard's ultra-prestigious Nieman Foundation for Journalism has inaugurated a prize named after muckraker and Stalinist fellow-traveller I.F. Stone. A poor choice, argues the Paper Cuts blog:

To establish a medal in his honor, one has to fudge the facts of Stone’s career... The brief description of Stone on the Foundation’s website is a classic case of — to use a polite word — dissembling...

[W]hat the Nieman Foundation apparently does not know is that during the years of the Cold War it was possible to be a critic of American society, to oppose McCarthyism and segregation, and also to be a vigorous opponent of Stalin and Communism. If it did, it might have elected to name its medal after another American journalist who ran an important magazine of his own for a while, who was a paragon of the “independence, integrity, courage and indefatigability” that the Nieman Foundation claims to value...He saw the truth more clearly than I. F. Stone ever did, and seems to me a more appropriate model for young journalists. (He was a better writer too.) His name is Dwight Macdonald.

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