THE MEDIA AND OUR COUNTRY'S AGENDA
60S
would have been a sensation, because there were, unfortunately, still so
many to convince. And in ten years, it will be necessary to republish it.
John Patrick Diggins:
There is a passage in
Fran~ois
Furet's book,
The
Passing of an Illusion,
where he says that we in Western Europe did not
have a
Partisan Review,
and it was
Partisan Review
that got the story
our as to what was happening in Eastern Europe, as did the
New
Leader,
but there was no counterpart to that in France or Italy.
Art Meyer:
Would you comment on the
Economist
as a source of infor–
mation from a journalistic point of view?
Edward Rothstein:
Th is is hard to do. I don't read the
Economist
cover
to cover every week. But I do read it for information on the interna–
tional scene. Sometimes it annoys me tremendously, but it offers facts or
interpretations of events that can't be easily found in the American
press. I now constantly read newspapers and publications on the web.
This, to me, has become more valuable than most magazine subscrip–
tions, because I can survey quickly what is happening in different areas,
I can read the
Independent
or
Ha'aretz.
Whatever I want to take a look
at is right there. I also would recommend a site called Arts and Letters
Daily (
) which is a daily updated anthology of intellec–
tually oriented web essays. The site contains links to publications all
over the world that have interesting articles, each link introduced by
three or four lines of text. You can learn a lot by looking at each of these
links. Because you end up following a link to read something in the
Guardian
and it gets you so upset that you follow another link to some–
thing else and you learn something. Then you go back and follow other
links, and pretty soon you've established a sort of web yourself, which
offers different pictures of what is happening in the world .
Bruce Anderson:
One comment about the
Economist,
as an English–
man . I find it most convincing about countries which I know nothing
about. That slightly worries me. But it has been at its best since Sep–
tember
II,
there has been no backsliding. One of the Washington edi–
tors is a chap called Adrian Wooldridge, a very clever man, a Fellow of
All Souls, a great supporter of George W., and a great supporter of
America. And one or two of his colleagues in London had read his copy,
queried it, and asked, "Are you really as pro-America as that?" He said,
"Now, now, Neville."
