Ben Bradlee

Katherine Graham, the late publisher of The Washington Post, is legend in their newsroom. Not to mention in Hollywood, which has just turned out a glitzy tribute to Mrs. Graham, starring Meryl Streep as the publisher who, with executive editor Ben Bradlee, fought the Nixon administration over the release of the Pentagon Papers. Now the very same paper rallied against releasing the Nunes memo.

Steven Spielberg has made a new movie glorifying The Washington Post and how it rallied against Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War in the Pentagon Papers court fight of 1971. It’s simply called The Post, and everyone is drawing a comparison between Nixon's difficult relationship with the press and Donald Trump's. The media, of course, were guaranteed to gush over this movie that polishes their…

The reception given to Sally Quinn's new book, Finding Magic, has been strangely quiet. Perhaps that's because the book shamelessly reveals that since 1973, if not earlier, Quinn, who was the nation's capital's de facto social gatekeeper for several decades, deceived the world about the true nature of her "religious" outlook, and did so with the help of the rest of the Washington press corps —…

So. Over at The Washington Post this week, I see that columnist Callum Borchers is upset with me. The reason, it seems, is that in an appearance on CNN’s Reliable Sources with Brian Stelter I had the audacity to say the following in a discussion about the current fashion of “fact checking” in the media.

Last week, former Washington Post features writer Martha Sherill oozed after “legendary” executive editor Ben Bradlee’s death that he was so handsome, he put Cary Grant to shame. So it’s a bit shocking to find another former Postie, Time editor at large David Von Drehle, outdoing Sherrill in the ooze department, throwing out the word “orgasm” to describe Bradlee’s charisma.

The New Yorker editor and former Washington Post reporter contends that “the most overstated notion” about the late Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee “was the idea that he was an ideological man. This was a cartoon.” He and Post publisher Katharine Graham, though “often seen as ferociously committed liberals…were, in fact, committed to the First Amendment.”

Michelle Fields of the Daily Caller attended the book party for Chris Matthews and his new book on JFK the "Elusive Hero" to draw out media reaction to the vague Herman Cain harassment allegations. Both MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee dumped their disdain on Cain. Bradlee even suggested Cain deserved it all: "I think he’s got it coming to him,…

Although most media members used the occasion of Mark Felt's death on December 18 to praise the former FBI official better known as "Deep Throat," George Friedman of the geopolitical intelligence organization Stratfor warned readers about journalists becoming "tools of various factions in political disputes" as well as "the relationship between security and intelligence organizations and…