IHT | Menlo Park?
Justin and I are right now arguing about this - we'll see if we can continue this fight online. Not to dance on graves, but I never liked Halberstam and have long seen him as the man who killed journalism. Yes, he did fight the official lies and disinformation of his time, but he failed time and again to fight them with facts or information. His style of extreme bias, vindictive writing, over-personalizing stories, and brutally over-simplifying caricatures of nearly every complicated issue he ever faced (including his war reporting in Africa prior to Vietnam) has been embraced by modern journalism. You can't have a drink with a few Western journalists without his name coming up. Many journalists point to Halberstam as the reason they went in to journalism: to fight against the stronger powers and to make a difference. I always thought they should be, you know, reporting - and Halberstam was a major reason I grew sick of the idea of becoming a journalist myself.
Halberstam was a man for his time, and we should leave his legacy there.
