Tag: journalism

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Opinion The Last Word

Local Journalist Files Suit Over Memphis Police Audits

What happened to government transparency? (Photo: Phartisan | Dreamstime.com)

For two and a half years, the City of Memphis has sent journalist Marc Perrusquia perfunctory communications that it is still reviewing and considering his records request, each time pushing the date for its response down the road. Perrusquia asked for the audits and evaluations of a Memphis police program that provides non-disciplinary intervention when police officers exhibit behavior and performance problems. The city’s policy and procedure manual requires an audit of the program every six months to evaluate the outcomes of supervisory interventions and the quality of reviews. Quarterly reports are also required.

Perrusquia, a journalist in Memphis for more than 30 years, asked for five years of the audits and evaluations on December 6, 2020. If an audit is done every six months in compliance with the city’s policy, that’s 10 audits. However, the city stonewalled his request, contacting him 41 times extending the “time necessary” to complete it. One time, the city told him that the responsive documents were with the city attorney for review. Then the next month, the city said it had not yet determined that records responsive to his request existed. Now Perrusquia has filed a lawsuit against the city over the delays, saying they amount to a constructive denial of his public records request. His attorney is Paul McAdoo with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and represents journalists in Tennessee as part of the Reporters Committee Local Legal Initiative.

The Tennessee Public Records Act (TPRA) outlines how government entities are required to respond to a public records request in T.C.A. § 10-7-503 (a)(2)(B):

“The custodian of a public record or the custodian’s designee shall promptly make available for inspection any public record not specifically exempt from disclosure. In the event it is not practicable for the record to be promptly available for inspection, the custodian shall, within seven (7) business days: (i) Make the public record requested available to the requestor; (ii) Deny the request in writing or by completing a records request response form developed by the office of open records counsel. The response shall include the basis for the denial; or (iii) Furnish the requester in writing, or by completing a records request response form developed by the office of open records counsel, the time reasonably necessary to produce the record or information.”

Perrusquia’s lawsuit says the city’s “chronic delay is a violation of the TPRA’s requirement that non-exempt public records be made ‘promptly’ available to the requester.” He also takes aim with the city’s multiple extensions of “the time reasonably necessary to produce the record or information.” “Mr. Perrusquia’s attempts to obtain these public records without filing a petition with this Court have been unsuccessful. It is therefore necessary to bring this action for access and judicial review,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit aims at a problem that confounds many journalists and others in Tennessee who request public records: A government entity that gives an estimate on when records will be available, then keeps extending the time over and over. Or, as in Perrusquia’s case: A government that never gives a time estimate and just keeps sending a pro forma letter that it is still reviewing the request and it will let you know later.

In my work as executive director of Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, I’ve often seen denial letters to journalists and citizens with this phrase: “The office is still in the process of retrieving, reviewing, and/or redacting the requested records,” with a note that the requester will hear back in another 30 days. The 30 days come, and the journalist gets the same response. Or they get no response, as if someone forgot to send out the letter again. On the outside, it feels like nothing is being done on your request for records and that maybe no one has even looked at it.

The problem with delays has been acute in Memphis for years. In August 2019, the Memphis Business Journal produced an investigative report about the city’s responses to public records requests. It documented a request it made on December 6, 2017. It was fulfilled a year later, but only after the editor of the newspaper was meeting with a high-level staffer about another matter and mentioned the delayed request. After he did, the staffer promised to look into it, and within three days the city fulfilled the request.

The city responded in the story, saying they initially thought they might have a staffing issue, either needing more people or more training of people. But later they told the newspaper they had a better handle on the situation and had updated its policy from a first-in/first-out to a rolling request system. “Under the new process, rather than letting one request hold up the queue just because it was received first, custodians will try to fill the easy requests quickly and fill large requests in sections.” That was 2019.

No matter the processes employed by government entities, Perrusquia’s lawsuit may be the first in Tennessee that has taken aim at unusual and inexplicable delays. It’s notable that he is asking for records that go to the heart of questions about police oversight in Memphis. His request was made in December 2020. In January 2023, Tyre Nichols was pulled over by police for what they said was reckless driving, then beat to such a pulp that he later died. Much of it was caught on body camera and a street camera. The police officers directly involved have been relieved of duty.

The audits of the city’s police program that seeks to intervene in behavior problems of police should have been released quickly, back in 2021. What do they show? Perhaps this lawsuit will shake them loose and, at the same time, push back on the pattern of delays that undermine transparency in government.

The case has been assigned to Shelby County Chancellor Melanie Taylor Jefferson.

Deborah Fisher is executive director of Tennessee Coalition for Open Government. Previously she spent 25 years in the news industry as a journalist.

Categories
At Large Opinion

Both Sides Now

Sean Hannity (Photo: Wikimedia | Tia Dufour)

I graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in the 1970s. The school runs a real daily newspaper, where students in their senior year get hands-on experience as reporters. In those long-ago days, we wrote on typewriters using cheap brown paper. Every desk had an ashtray on it. Our editors were veterans from dailies around the country and were mean as cobras. When you turned in a story, you better have spelled every name right and gotten “both sides” or you got your ass chewed and your story was wadded up and thrown into an editor’s wastebasket. Back then, nothing was stored on a computer, so you started your rewrite from scratch. Good times. We drank a lot of beer after work.

One day, the police radio in the corner of the newsroom reported that a child had been run over and killed by a school bus. I was given the story. I dutifully called the school district spokesperson and got a boilerplate statement: “We regret this unavoidable tragedy, blah blah.” I got the police report and wrote up the details of the accident; then I got a quote from a police spokesperson. When I turned in my story, the editor tossed it back to me and said, “This needs a statement from the kid’s parents.”

I was mortified. I couldn’t even imagine what question I would ask the parents of a dead 5-year-old. I sat staring at the phone. An hour later, I told the editor that I’d called the parents’ house several times and no one had answered. It was before answering machines and cell phones and there was a looming press deadline, so I got away with it. I decided then that I was not hard-boiled enough for daily newspaper reporting.

This “get both sides” ethos still remains, but what was once our universal source of news and information — the local newspaper — is a crispy cicada shell. Most of them aren’t even locally owned any longer. They’re doing what they can with the resources they have, but millions of Americans are now self-selecting their news sources. And, sadly, millions of those Americans have no idea how to distinguish legitimate news reporting from propaganda and misinformation.

Take an issue like, say, the minimum wage. It’s $7.25 an hour and hasn’t been raised in 13 years. A traditional journalist would explore the issue by talking to business owners, hourly workers, labor union officials, and economists.

Those in favor of raising the minimum wage would say it puts more money in the pockets of the working class, which will spend it, which will drive the economy via increased sales of appliances, cars, vacations, etc. Those opposed would argue that raising the minimum wage will increase labor costs, which will increase the price of goods, cause inflation, and put companies out of business.

After getting input from both sides, a journalist would then dig into historical trends, to see what actually happened when the minimum wage was raised in the past. Then, voila!, a news article. Fair and balanced. Two sides with a little neutral analysis. This was journalism for decades. Pick an issue. Rinse and repeat. Done properly, the reader would have no idea how the reporter felt about the minimum wage. Reporters were not even allowed to cover stories where they might have a conflict of interest.

Contrast that with the recently released taped conversations between former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows and Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo and Sean Hannity. Bartiromo is heard telling Meadows the questions she’s going to ask Trump in an upcoming interview, setting up the softballs, so to speak. Hannity is heard asking Meadows, “Which states do we need to focus on?” in order to drive GOP voter turnout for Trump. Note the “we.” After getting his marching orders, Hannity ends the conversation by saying, “Yes, sir!” to Meadows. Welcome to the new “fair and balanced.” And don’t even get me started on the racist bilge that Tucker Carlson spews out to 4.3 million Americans every night.

The Fox News network and its hosts have an agenda. They are the network of Trumpism and manufactured far-right outrage. The hosts at MSNBC also have an agenda, a progressive one, though I don’t think they’re anywhere near as manipulative of the truth as Fox.

The overarching point is that people need to learn to distinguish between reporting, opinion, and propaganda. Legitimate news reporting exists; it’s just harder to find amid all the dreck pouring from the political fringes. Propaganda is designed to make you feel something — fear, anger, outrage. Good journalism is supposed to make you think. We need to seek out the latter.

Categories
News News Blog

MLK50 Hires Adrienne Johnson Martin as Executive Editor

MLK50: Justice Through Journalism named Adrienne Johnson Martin as the nonprofit newsroom’s first executive editor. She will begin her tenure starting September 7th.

“The strength of Adrienne’s ideas and her passion for justice made her the perfect choice for this job,” said Wendi C. Thomas, founding editor and publisher of MLK50. “As we move from startup mode to sustainability, it’s essential that our leadership bench has depth and that’s what Adrienne brings. I am elated that she’s joining the team and I look forward to building the organization together.”

Johnson Martin is based in Raleigh, North Carolina. She recently held the position of managing editor for Duke Magazine, Duke University’s alumni publication, and has plenty of previous journalism experience. She worked at the Los Angeles Times as a copy editor and writer, and was part of the 1994 team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Northridge earthquake. She also covered radio, television, and film for the The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, before becoming the publication’s associate features editor.

“I love that I’ll have the chance to be in community with a team that knows we don’t have to live in a zero-sum world and is committed to telling the stories of those on the losing side of that paradigm,” said Johnson Martin. “These are journalists who use their talents in service of justice. What’s better than that?

“The executive editor job is an incredible opportunity for me to support Wendi’s vision and to ensure that MLK50 becomes embraced by and deeply embedded in the Memphis community.”

Categories
Book Features Books

Bob Levey’s Larry Felder, Candidate

For more than 40 years, Bob Levey wrote for The Washington Post as a reporter and columnist, a robust career at one of the country’s top newspapers (including being in the middle of the glory days of Woodward and Bernstein).

When he took a buyout in 2004 at age 58, he made forays into running nonprofits and teaching. From 2006 to 2009, he held the Hardin Chair of Excellence at the University of Memphis in the Journalism Department, so he knows this town fairly well, having talked to civic clubs about journalism and what was going on at U of M.

But still, there was that itch: Levey wanted to write a novel. “Writers write,” he says. “And this book was in me, looking for a way to get out.”

Bob Levey

Doing what smart authors do, he wrote about what he knew. “My career in journalism possessed me to write it,” he says. “I’d been thinking about the news business, about politics. I do my best work in the shower, and there I was in the shower and I said why don’t you write a book? And I said, Okay. And by the time I got down to my toenails, I had fleshed out what I wanted to say.”

Larry Felder, Candidate‘s plot follows award-winning journalist Larry Felder who, at 56, has achieved much in the field. But he also wants to be in Congress. He abandons his secure career and jumps into his district’s race where, because of his fame and reputation, he enjoys a comfortable lead over his closest primary opponent. Naturally, complications ensue.

The book is something of a civics lesson in the electoral process as well as a celebration of classic print journalism, the kind with aggressive investigative reporting and snark in the newsroom. The sort of newspapering that, sadly, exists more in history than in the present.

“I love local news,” he says. “In many ways, local news is more accurate if you want to know what’s really going on in the world.” But the decline of the local press is painful for Levey.

“It’s a disaster,” he says. “Some big newspapers are being rescued by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Carlos Slim, the Mexican financier. But local news coverage is disappearing because it doesn’t fit with some overarching marketing plan or with where they think their circulation base is going to be, and that’s terrible because nobody’s going to pick up the slack for that, unless it’s a couple of 400-pound bloggers sitting in a bathtub somewhere, and that’s not good enough.”

Of course there’s the World Wide Web, making information available instantly throughout most of the world. But Levey’s not sanguine about it. “The internet cannot do what good local newspaper coverage can do,” he says. “It hasn’t been monetized or it hasn’t been set up to try to do that.”

Levey went to work at the Washington Post as a general assignment reporter in the Metro section in 1967. Legendary editor Ben Bradlee hired him and to this day, Levey salutes him for what he taught and for standing by his reporters. And if you want a sense of what Bradlee was like, Levey suggests the 1976 film All the President’s Men. It famously stars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, but the late Jason Robards took the role of Bradlee and, Levey says, nailed it.

“I’ve never seen an actor inhabit a character the way he did in that film,” Levey says. “I knew Bradlee for decades, and Robards got him cold — the voice, the intonations, the body language, the way he curls his mouth, the way he puts his right foot up on the edge of the desk in the newsroom when he’s talking to you. It’s just perfect.”

The film’s producers recreated the newsroom in California, and they wanted it authentic, right down to the trash. “So for weeks, we put our garbage into big cardboard barrels that were shipped to California and strewn around the mock newsroom. The closest I’m ever going to get into Hollywood stardom is seeing some of my Styrofoam coffee cups in the movie. Authentic trash is my middle name.”

Levey will sign copies of his novel Larry Felder, Candidate and discuss his time at The Post, Watergate, writing, and the current state of journalism on March 22nd from 4 to 6 p.m. in Spain Auditorium in Buckman Hall on the campus of Christian Brothers University, 650 East Parkway South. The event is free and open to the public.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

True Story

The crusading reporter character has a deep history in America. Superman, the very embodiment of the American ideal, chose a journalist, Clark Kent, as his alter ego. But even though we have the institution of the press enshrined in our founding documents, our portrayals of reporters reveal an ambivalent attitude toward the Fourth Estate. For every Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein uncovering the truth about Nixon’s corruption in All the President’s Men, we have a Kirk Douglas as the cynical Chuck Tatum, the self-serving tabloid writer who jazzes up a story by letting his subject slowly die in a dark cave in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole.

Jonah Hill’s portrayal of real-life magazine writer Michael Finkel in True Story falls somewhere between those two extremes. When the film opens, Finkel is at the top of his game. He’s had 10 New York Times Magazine cover stories in three years, and he thinks his latest one about slavery in Africa might just earn him the Pulitzer he wants so badly. But there’s a problem: It seems he has conflated — or perhaps wholly invented — the lead subject in his story, and when his bosses at The Gray Lady find out, he gets the boot. But did Finkel punch up the story on purpose, or was it a mistake by a writer who was relying on translators and bribery to get a story in an unfamiliar land?

How you interpret the opening sequence of the film, based on a memoir by Finkel, will determine your attitude toward the meat of True Story‘s story. Hill is a sympathetic presence in the film, but his disgraced reporter character operates under a cloud of suspicion, both from colleagues and the audience. While he’s frantically pitching comeback stories from his cabin in Montana (The Times clearly pays more than Memphis journos are accustomed to), he gets a call from another reporter asking why a fugitive from justice in Mexico was claiming to be Michael Finkel when he was caught.

Finkel finds out the fugitive using his name is Christian Longo (James Franco), an Oregon man accused of killing his wife and three children. Now, Finkel’s got a killer story with a winning angle, and when he travels to Oregon to meet Longo in the flesh, it gets even better. Longo is an aspiring writer and fan of Finkel’s work who says he is innocent. But even though he writes novella-length letters to the reporter from his holding cell, he won’t reveal who the real killer is. With a charismatic, articulate white guy who is about to be wrongly convicted of murder as his protagonist, Finkel’s magazine story turns into a book deal with Harper Collins. But is Longo really, as he says, a “nice guy 99 percent of the time,” or a low-key Hannibal Lector?

Hill is playing against the type he created in comedic roles such as Superbad and 21 Jump Street. I was reminded of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre where Humphrey Bogart played a completely unsympathetic and unscrupulous character, but his onscreen charisma made him appear to be a hero. Even Finkle’s wife Jill (an underused Felicity Jones) expresses her doubts about his reporting skills, but he dives deep into the case, and we’re along for the ride as he vacillates between the conviction that Longo is innocent and that he should be convicted. Franco has more experience at playing charismatic sociopaths. His road to leading manhood took a deliciously devious turn as Alien, the archetypal Florida gangbanger in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers. Franco deftly walks the tightrope between soulful boy next door and cold-blooded murderer, and his finely tuned performance ultimately saves True Story from the turgid, CSI melodrama the source material suggests.

Director Rupert Goold has roots in the English theater, and he’s more interested in watching the sparks fly when he puts Hill and Franco together in a prison visiting room than he is in composing compelling images. True Story lacks the technical bravado of Gone Girl, but it’s a worthy addition to the true crime genre — even if it leaves viewers questioning the meaning of “true.”

Categories
News

Andy Wise is Now on WMC-5’s Side

CREDIT: WREG.com

The Flyer just received the following press release from WMC-TV:

December 21, 2007 — The Mid-South’s premier newscast and best known investigative reporter are joining forces in an unprecedented move: Investigative reporter Andy Wise is leaving WREG to join WMC-TV and Action News 5.

Wise is a long-time consumer investigative specialist who is instantly recognizable to Mid-South viewers as a no-nonsense, hard-hitting reporter. With Wise joining “The Action News 5 Investigators” there can be little doubt that WMC-TV5 has cornered the market for television investigative reporting.

“For generations, Mid-Southerners have trusted the tradition of broadcast journalism at Action News 5. They grew up watching it. Their parents grew up watching it. Now in the age of HDTV, I am thrilled to be a part of producing ground-breaking segments for WMC-TV and wmctv.com that will set a new standard for consumer protection in this generation,” said Action News 5’s Andy Wise.

Got that, people? Andy Wise will take his hard-hittin’ investigative mojo over to Joe Birch’s place. You’ve been warned.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

You Can Make This Stuff Up

It isn’t easy to put George Wallace, the Neshoba County Fair, and “why we are in Iraq” in the same column space, but here goes.

I literally could not believe my eyes last week when I read in a column by Wall Street Journal deputy editor Daniel Henninger that George Wallace was “shot dead” while running for president in 1972.

As everyone apparently doesn’t know, the former governor of Alabama was shot and wounded in 1972 but lived until 1998. The gunshot paralyzed Wallace, and images of him in a wheelchair are icons of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s when, to put it mildly, he remained politically active and, in his later years, often apologized for his racist past.

It is a cardinal sin of journalism to point at someone else’s errors. I have made my own share and will doubtless make another one very soon as cosmic punishment for writing this. But Henninger’s column, which is unfortunately headlined “Wonder Land,” seems to me to explain, in a way, something about The Wall Street Journal editorial page and even why we are in Iraq.

The headline on the column is “1968: The Long Goodbye.” The thrust of it is familiar to regular readers of the Journal such as me: Many of America’s problems can be traced back to the permissiveness of the 1960s. Along with denunciations of the Clintons and Mississippi tort lawyers, this is one of the touchstones of the Journal‘s editorial page.

The year 1968, when I was 19 years old and in college, was particularly traumatic: President Lyndon Johnson’s announcement that he would not seek reelection; the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy; the violence outside the Democratic Party national convention in Chicago, to name a few.

Wallace got roughly 13 percent of the vote as a third-party candidate for president in 1968. Richard Nixon won. Wallace was indeed shot but not shot dead four years later when his political appeal was perhaps even stronger.

The error was corrected in the online version of the Journal on Friday and in the print newspaper on Saturday. How it got in the column in the first place is as baffling as why. You would think that one of the greatest newspapers in the world would have copy editors for even the best opinion writers. It’s hard to think of an innocent explanation for “shot dead.” Maybe the copy desk did it. It isn’t very likely that Henninger meant to say “not shot dead” or “almost shot dead” or simply “shot” but wrote it as “shot dead.” I guess if you believe the Sixties and the hippies ruined America, it makes a better story if George Wallace was not just shot but “shot dead” even if it is tantamount to saying the civil rights movement was never the same after King was “wounded” in Memphis in 1968.

It was my second “say what?” reaction to a national columnist in two weeks. David Brooks of The New York Times wrote that Ronald Reagan was not appealing to Southern racists to bolster the Republican Party when he defended “states’ rights” at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980.

Three civil rights workers were killed in Neshoba County in 1964. I covered the annual fair for UPI in 1980 and got a first-hand look at Cecil Price, the deputy who turned the young men over to their killers. Another mainstay of the event was racist former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, who played and sang “Are You From Dixie?” Reagan knew perfectly well what he was doing.

So here’s my theory. Ideologues, left or right, sometimes blind themselves to facts that don’t fit their view of the world or make up new ones that fit it better. Here comes the great leap — you might say this is what the Bush administration and its mouthpiece, the Journal’s editorial page, did on the war in Iraq.

That’s enough. Like I said, my own howler of an error is probably right around the next corner. It won’t do any good to say I have been a faithful reader of The Wall Street Journal for 30 years, always praise it extravagantly when I talk to would-be journalists, and admire its disdain for on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand commentary. My goose is cooked.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Q&A: Karanja Ajanaku

The Memphis Tri-State Defender has gone through a lot of changes recently. In June, former Commercial Appeal reporter and editor Karanja Ajanaku assumed the executive editorship. Ajanaku avoids disparaging remarks about either his previous employer or Tri-State predecessors, though he acknowledges that he brings much-needed energy to his new job.

The Tri-State also recently moved into a new office overlooking W.C. Handy Park on Beale Street, where its first office opened in 1951. — Preston Lauterbach

Flyer: Tell us about your experience in local media.

Ajanaku: I spent 14 years as a reporter, starting out general assignment. I got to see the world and find out who I was. I covered City Hall in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

How did you view the Tri-State defender when you worked for The Commercial Appeal?

My interest in the Tri-State is longstanding. I came down here to volunteer. I wanted to help. That editor, for whatever reason, wasn’t able to have that conversation with me but later claimed that the African-American reporters in town didn’t find any way to contribute to the Tri-State. I thought, These two points aren’t hooking up.

What do you see as the role of black media in Memphis?

I see myself as an agent of change. Part of the job of being an executive editor of this paper is to effect change in the community. I intend to do that. We have to eliminate ethnic hatred. That’s the number-one thing that we have to do in this town.

How does the tri-state deal with the issues facing print media with declining circulations?

It’s no secret that the Tri-State has to increase its circulation. But if you’re delivering a relevant product — as it was in the past — you will serve the community and be profitable, and that’s what I intend to do.

We have to be able to communicate, to advertisers first of all, that we can penetrate the African-American community deeper and on a broader level than [other media] in this town. Real Times Media is interested in doing what it can for us to be relevant today — to pick up from the glory days of the African-American newspaper.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

A Master Journalist

David Halberstam, who was killed in a car accident in California last week, was no stranger to Memphis and the Mid-South.

He began his journalism career in West Point, Mississippi, and Nashville in the 1950s and early 1960s. He returned to Nashville 10 years ago to revisit the Rev. James Lawson and the other participants in the lunch-counter sit-ins in his book The Children. His own daughter joined Teach For America and worked

at a school in the Mississippi Delta. And Halberstam was a close friend of Memphian Henry Turley and, through him, became acquainted with several Memphians.

In the jargon of psychology, Halberstam would be considered a “phenomenologist” — someone whose judgments came from intuiting the life lived by the subjects of his journalism, seeing the world as they experienced it in the fullness of keenly seen details. He was never one for bestowing prefabricated judgments on his subjects.

Curtis Wilkie, a retired Boston Globe journalist who, like Halberstam, logged time in Mississippi before heading to other points on the compass, recollected his friend and fellow émigré in remarks to the downtown Rotary Club on Tuesday. Wilkie, who still has his down-home drawl and settled finally in New Orleans, talked of how Halberstam never got the South out of his system. He would return to these parts over and over, and though Halberstam had documented better than most the South’s time of trial during the years of the civil rights revolution, he never felt superior to the troubled region and never failed to see its virtues.

Halberstam was generous with his time and advice if he considered one a serious journalist and not a “twinkie.” His voice was god-like, his eyes probing, and his range of knowledge simply incredible.

Many of us in the news business grew up with his bylines in The New York Times during the Vietnam War. For four decades after that, he produced an impressive shelf of thick, hard-to-put-down books on the news media, war, the Fifties, baseball, basketball, and the auto industry.

The fact is, he was able to discern the complexities of humanity and its struggles and surprises from wherever he reported — including Vietnam, where he was the first full-time reporter of the war, getting there years before the massive infusion of American troops and seeing, earlier than almost anyone, the developing tragedy of that effort. For his efforts, he won a well-deserved Pulitzer. And Halberstam’s books on sports history, notably his chronicle of the Yankees-Red Sox pennant battle of 1949, showed that he could render conflict and suspense in that arena as well.

He was a master at interviewing people and explaining things. His books touched so many people in so many walks of life that his memorial service could have filled Yankee Stadium (or, well, Fenway Park) had that been his wish.

To read David Halberstam was to feel uncomfortably inferior but also to determine to try harder and do better at the craft he practiced so well.