Playing “gotcha” at the slightest sign of hypocrisy is a game for journalism’s cheap shot artists. Nonetheless, the case of Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter deserves special mention. Last week, in a piece on Newsweek’s role in the suicide of Adm. Jeremy Boorda, Alter gave his magazine and his profession a bye. “No matter what we resolve,” he said, “we journalists can’t guarantee that tragedies won’t happen.” Oh? So why didn’t he think of that back in 1993, following the suicide of Clinton White House aide Vincent Foster? You may recall that Foster had scribbled “WSJ editors lie without consequence” in the days before he killed himself — referring to the Wall Street Journal editorial page and its pursuit of information about Whitewater and Travelgate. Alter went into apoplexy, implicating the Wall Street Journal with this sentence: “If Robert Bartley, the Journal’s editor, hasn’t been sleeping fitfully, he’s even less of a human being than his worst enemies imagine.” If Alter doesn’t apologize to Bartley now for changing his tune when it comes to his own bosses and place of employ, he will prove less of a human being himself.
