Right in the old gazoo

Senator Alan K. Simpson has never hesitated to call out reporters when they've overstepped their bounds. Eighteen years in the United States Senate have given this outspoken politician plenty of opportunity for clashes with the press, which he now recounts in Right in the Old Gazoo.

With his distinctive, pull-no-punches style, Simpson points out where the media have erred (all over the place!) and offers a wealth of vividly told anecdotes that show how an irresponsible press threatens the freedoms that Americans hold dear. And here for the first time he gives his side of dustups with journalists, such as veteran reporter Peter Arnett and National Public Radio's Nina Totenberg. It's an insightful book that is also entertaining to read.

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Simpson laments that too many journalists today have become "lazy, complacent, sloppy, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, cynical, and arrogant beyond measure." He describes how newspaper and television reporters manipulate the American public by presenting skewed versions of the news; he discusses the use of polling information (and pollsters), and he raises ethical questions about the now-common practice of unnamed sources in news reports.

To Simpson, journalistic ethics have almost all but disappeared in the zeal to hunt down a story, and he feels that there is little sense of fairness, respect for privacy, or even simple human compassion. Simpson's compelling, behind-the-scenes examples scrutinize the press's aggressive treatment of Gary Hart, Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, and Dan Quayle.