As a charter member of what has been called the Church of Liebling, I have good news for fellow worshippers (hat tip to Holly in the next pew).
Liebling’s coverage of World War II for the New Yorker has now been gathered into a volume of 1089 pages by the Library of America. Like everything else he wrote, by reporting what he saw and heard, Liebling conveyed more about his subject than all the TV cameras and embedded journalists have told us about Iraq.
I have had the temerity to borrow his name for my URL, but it’s likely Liebling would have been ambivalent about blogs. As a press critic, he was a premature blogger himself, looking behind the news and picking apart the work of those who delivered it, making connections between the motives and methods of the messengers and the frequent unreliability of the message.
But a reporter at heart, Liebling hated experts. He mistrusted anyone who claimed “to have access to some occult source or science not available to reporter or reader…the big picture.”
He didn’t like editors much, either…