About the time the Post printed the Pentagon Papers was about the time the paper shifted from conservative to liberal. Their bias against the right began way back then.
@Rivergirl The New Republic is liberal, so is the Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Minneapolis Tribune, much of the New York Times,
all of the New York Post, save that oasis in which it publishes my dispatches.
---William F. Buckley, Jr., in Up From Liberalism, 1959.
One also keeps in mind that a given newspaper's (the
New Republic, obviously, is a journal of opinion) editorial inclination isn't always
or necessarily the same as its pure news reporting, though there
are instances often enough where its pure news reporting crosses
a line. Today, it seems to me, the
Washington Post's straight-up reporting is far less biased than that of the
New York Times, and
the
Post's liberal editorial stance hasn't changed in lo these many years. Either that or the
Times is just a lot more flagrant about
it.
The
Post wasn't the paper that first published the Pentagon Papers; that honour, if such it was, goes to the
New York Times. And
therein lies a peculiar corollary: The
Times published the Papers at first without naming the source of the leak. A
Times reporter,
Sidney Zion (who'd previously exposed the chicaneries around the disaster that was the otherwise entertaining New York World's Fair of
1964-65 in the
New York Post) wondered to himself just who had leaked the Papers to
Timesman Neil Sheehan. Zion got on
the trail and came up Daniel Ellsberg.
But nobody would let him run with it in print. (At one point, Zion later recorded, he was lamenting that he had a great story and couldn't
tell it anywhere, and his little daughter Libby overheard him and purred, "Daddy, you can tell me the story." "Great!" Zion remembered
thinking. "I'm down to my seven-year-old kid.") Zion ended up asking WMCA radio host Barry Gray if he'd be interested in having him
name the leaker on the air. Gray pounced on the chance, and Zion named Ellsberg on Gray's evening radio show.
The next day all hell broke loose. Zion was considered a pariah in New York journalism; numerous New York columnists attacked Zion
mercilessly. The
Times barred him from their pages indefinitely, and no other New York paper save a nondescript weekly would publish
him at last, giving him a column, and Zion wasted no time in zapping the
Times for the apparent blackball, including this memorable
wisecrack:
The Times
wants to teach me about ethics. This is a lot like learning about love from Attila the Hun.
It turned out that that wisecrack ended up breaking the ice, when Zion bumped into the
Times's then-managing editor A.M. Rosenthal
in a New York watering hole and Rosenthal poked him with an elbow genially saying
Gnug, Yiddish for "I forgive you." Zion almost
fell over with that one, then Rosenthal stopped him and said let bygones be bygones because, after all, "You broke a great story." It
ended Zion's blackballing and he went on with his career.
In his later years, Zion almost singlemindedly crusaded to improve working conditions for young medical residents after the aforesaid
daughter died in the hospital after being admitted for flu-like symptoms that turned into cardiac arrest---after she'd been treated
almost solely by first-year, unsupervised, and overworked medical residents who didn't spot the possibility of cardiac trouble emanating
from an antidepressant she'd been prescribed and who'd prescribed another drug known to cause cardiac arrest if it interacted too
seriously with her antidepressant. Libby Zion was 18; her parents eventually won a six-figure judgment against the hospital. They also
led to the passing of what's known in New York as the Libby Zion Law, which bars doctors from working 80-hour weeks and more than
24 hours at a single time.
Zion died of cancer in 2009; his wife, Elsa, died of cancer four years earlier. You can get Zion's complete take on his role in the Pentagon
Papers controversy in his book
Read All About It! The Collected Adventures of a Maverick Reporter, a collection of his articles including
the ones that blew the whistle on the New York World's Fair boondoggle.
