The Washington Post, wrote Ben Bagdikian in a 1967 Columbia Journalism Review article, was then "within a lunge of greatness." Bagdikian, an unrelenting liberal and one of the country's most thoughtful press critics, believed that the Post, among other faults, too often let its own liberal view color its news coverage.
Impressed, Post Publisher Katharine Graham wrote him a fan letter. Later the paper offered him a senior job. He rushed through a media-research program he had been doing in California and came back east in 1970, first as the paper's assistant managing editor for national affairs and then, for the past...
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