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Many of his pieces, including profiles of radical historians and economists and lengthy series on inequality and deforestation, are well-reported stories that stand up to scrutiny nearly 20 years later. Writing in the AIM newsletter, author Joseph Goulden finds bias in a 1970 profile of journalist I.F. Stone because MacDougall neglected to say that Stone had been a doctrinaire Stalinist (a charge Stone dismisses as "absolute nonsense"). In fact, MacDougall's article does quote Stone as saying that he was a "Communist-anarchist" in his youth and had since come to describe himself as "half a liberal, half a radical."
MacDougall's former editors remember him as a cantankerous man whose meticulous and exhaustive reporting was worth the trouble. "He was a star," says William Thomas, the recently retired Los Angeles Times editor who recruited MacDougall as a special writer in the late 1970s. Michael Gartner, who edited MacDougall's front-page Journal stories in the 1960s, and is now president of NBC News, calls him an "editor's dream. He was a very thorough, very careful, very good reporter."
^ Both men insist that MacDougall's stories had to pass through a gauntlet of editors who would have prevented him from pursuing any hidden agenda. "It might happen once," says Thomas, "but then a flag would go up." Gartner believes the presence of a socialist on the paper probably benefited Journal readers. "Diversity on the staff is something you hope for," he notes. MacDougall says this was exactly his point. Upset by the hostile response, he has produced a revised version of the MR article that will appear in the upcoming issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.