Ex-Reporter MacDougall
David Shaw’s story on the former Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal reporter, A. Kent MacDougall, attempted to discredit MacDougall’s recently published boast that he had insinuated material promoting his radical beliefs into the stories he wrote for those papers (“A ‘Closet Socialist’ Stirs Furor Over News Stories,” Part I, Jan. 31). Shaw perceived that MacDougall’s confession that he had been a media mole provided strong support to those who charge that journalists let their views influence what they report and how they report it. Shaw did his best to prove this wasn’t true.
In doing so, Shaw demonstrated the truth of the charge almost as well as MacDougall had done in his Monthly Review articles. Shaw’s story revealed his liberal bias just as clearly as MacDougall’s stories in The Times and the Journal had revealed his.
Shaw didn’t even consider the possibility that MacDougall got away with his deception at The Times and the Journal because of, not in spite of, the fact that some of his editors shared his ideological views.
REED IRVINE
Chairman
Accuracy in Media
Washington, D.C.
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