Reporters Who Made History: Great American Journalists on the Issues and Crises of the Late 20th Century

Hallock, Steven M. Reporters Who Made History: Great American Journalists on the Issues and Crises of the Late 20th Century. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2010. 332 pp. $54.95.

Journalism, archival history, and oral history meet in Steven M. Hallock's Reporters Who Made History.

An assistant professor at Point Park University in Pittsburgh after a long career as a newspaper journalist, he builds upon a series of interviews that he performed in 2006 with ten prominent journalists, who were chosen for their historical significance and for coming from a cross-section of the profession. He paired the journalists with specific decades, ranging from the 1950s through the 1990s, and gave them an opportunity to expound on major events in journalism history as well as history writ large. So, for example, Anthony Lewis and Helen Thomas dissect the 1 95Os. The other eight are Morley Safer, Earl Caldwell, Benjamin Bradlee, Georgie Anne Geyer, Juan Williams, Ellen Goodman, David Broder, and Judy Woodruff.

Each journalist receives a short biographical sketch. Hallock provides a bit of context by summarizing the news from the day of the journalist's birth, and then uses the journalist's stories, memoirs, and personal recollections to flesh out that person's perspective on major stories, lhus, the fresh material - the interviews...