RBS, the journalist

 There used to be special people whose job was to go into war zones and state houses and theaters and private homes and wild places to bring back information for the rest of us about what was going on in the world. These people were not necessarily smarter or braver than anybody else, but they shared a desire to discover the truth and a nose for falsehood. They had what was called news judgment.

    Yesterday we lost a real journalist. Dick Stolley joined Life Magazine in 1953, when magazines and pictures were important. As a reporter, writer, bureau chief and managing editor, he covered the world, from the civil rights movement on. He is the person who had the news sense—and skill at negotiating—to land the rights to the only film of JFK's assassination. He also hired me for the first issue of a magazine he founded called People, my first job in a career that would change my life, much of it at Life and People. Over the years he hired me back twice, and taught me—and many others—what it was to be a journalist, back when that was a respected job title rather than a word spit out dismissively.

   These days everyone’s a photographer and a reporter, but they are mostly reporting on themselves, from their fixed points of view. Wars from the inside. Protests from the inside. Restaurants. Movies. Professors. Movements. Politics. No objectivity, evenhandedness, factchecking. No attempt to put these feeds of information in context. No editing. No one to look at the work and say, "Un-understand" or "Huh?"  “Wait a minute, can this really be true?"

   Everyone's a critic, but only a handful have the critical eye. And one of them is gone.