Ah, you think, what vicious fun he would have had with Time‘s deathless memorialization of the president-elect’s Labor Day campaign kickoff (“an unseen member of the audience was destiny”)! Wouldn’t he have caught and chronicled the careful shift to the right Newsweek has pulled off over the past couple of years? Wouldn’t he, right now, be exposing for the fraud that it is the post-election rush of the press to dismiss the influence of the Moral Majority? And wouldn’t he have done these things and more without the debilitating cynicism that underlies the best press criticism currently available? “I am an incorrigible optimist about newspapers,” wrote Liebling, not very convincingly, as he wrapped up The Press, an annotated collection of New Yorker “Wayward Press” columns. A reading of Sokolov’s thoroughly researched biography has one unmistakable effect: it makes you wish, with some desperation, that Liebling were still on the case. Liebling (Harper & Row, $16.95), Raymond Sokolov notes that had the New Yorker press critic, war correspondent and lowlife/boxing/food writer lived 10 more years-Liebling died in 1963 at 59, from gluttony-“he might have written press criticism about Vietnam and Watergate,” “revisited Egypt and Israel” to cover the Six-Day War, and applied himself to the transformation of Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali. Near the end of Wayward Reporter: The Life of A.J.
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