Ex-Reporter MacDougall

I am concerned about the “rush to excuse” attitudes demonstrated in your article about MacDougall. Everyone from the dean of a graduate school of journalism to various editors of The Times and the Wall Street Journal seemed eager to make light of MacDougall’s leftist magazine article, “Boring From Within the Bourgeois Press.”

And yet, this is a man who admits to being staunchly Marxist and claims to have for many years used his position as a Times and Journal reporter to secretly “help popularize radical ideas.” MacDougall describes the use of techniques like making sure to seek out experts whose opinions he knew in advance would support his subversive thesis. These revelations are too hastily dismissed as “exaggerated” by the editors who worked with him. I question their willingness to face the truth just as I would question a nuclear plant manager’s dismissive account of a “small accident.” Serious implications require a serious response.

ROBERT JUST

Los Angeles