Word: reader
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...powerful friend and attentive reader, then-Attorney General Richmond Flowers, was out of office. (Flowers was interviewing a job applicant last year when his executive assistant recalled seeing the name in the Courier; he dug out the story--a series of chats with friends of Ku Klux Klan Wizard Robert Shelton--showed it to Flowers, and the interview ended abruptly.) A number of federal and state judges and other officials continue to subscribe (Alabama has two subscriptions--one for the state archives, the other for the anti-poverty office), but few are as avid followers of it as was Flowers...
From time to time candor fails even the most inventive reporter. The skeptical reader should know that the attribution of Richard Nixon's deepest thoughts to "the friends of Richard Nixon" is a cover for Nixon himself, insisted upon by Nixon...
...these attributions--U.S. officials, White House sources--are the easy ones. The newspaper reader also encounters a large and voluble crew of authoritative sources, reliable authorities, analysts, associates of the Senator, friends of the Vice President, those who know and plain old informed sources. (Even cognoscenti once had a certain vogue.) With such an embarrassment of reliability, how do you know who it is upon whom you are relying? It is clear, for instance, that "a source" is not on a par with "the Highest Authority," but common sense is not always a good guide. You have to weigh...
...matters of style the reporter who gets a good story from a very good but anonymous source has the poet's problem; he has to tell it with such airs the reader knows he has a sword upstairs, and so a story out of Johnson City Tex., beginning "President Johnson is known to believe . . ." is translated by insiders as "President Johnson told me today...
...like the Marquis de Sade, lent his name to the glossary of psychiatric terms. This first English-language biography by a journeyman translator and biographer (Pushkin, Brighter than a Thousand Suns) tries hard to deal coolly with its subject, but Sacher-Masoch was such a bumbler that the reader cannot take him seriously. The poor fellow was really a kind of romantic, who always hoped to find the worst in women and hardly ever did. He was born in 1836 in Galicia, then part of Austria, the son of a police commissioner. His early books were histories, which critics found...