I sat down on Friday and started reading a collection of essays by the fabled journalist, I.F. Stone.

I remember running across his I.F. Stone’s Weekly in about 1968 while searching for news about the war in Vietnam, and finding myself mesmerized by the careful accounts and analysis of government policies and events. He laid a structure and a sense of history down over the chaos of controversial ongoing events. His weekly newsletter ended its run just a few years later, and we then read his essays in the New York Review of Books, the Nation, and elsewhere.

This week, I was looking for something different to read. There was Izzie.

Wow!

Here’s a snipped from his introductory essay, originally written in July 1963 for his collection, “The Haunted Fifties”, and now reprinted in a volume, “The Best of I.F. Stone.”

How about this spot-on criticism of mainstream newspapers? And this was written nearly fifty years ago!

The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent. It is the absence of news. With a dozen or so honorable exceptions, most American newspapers carry very little news. Their main concern is advertising. The main interest of our society is merchandising. All the so-called communications industries are primarily concerned not with communications, but with selling. This is obvious on television and radio but it is only a little less obvious in the newspapers. Most owners of newspapers are businessmen, not newspapermen. The news is something which fills the spaces left over by the advertisers.

And then there’s this self-description in the same essay. Perhaps I learned a little from him even from a great distance.

I made no claim to inside stuff-obviously a radical reporter in those days had few pipelines into the government. I tried to give information which could be documented so the reader could check it for himself. I tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible. I also sought to give the Weekly a personal flavor, to add humor, wit and good writing to the Weekly report. I felt that if one were able enough and had sufficient vision one could distill meaning, truth and even beauty from the swiftly flowing debris of the week’s news. I sought in political reporting what Galsworthy in another context called “the significant trifle”-the bit of dialogue, the overlooked fact, the buried observation which illuminated the realities of the situation. These I often used in “boxes” to lighten up the otherwise solid pages of typography unrelieved either by picture or advertising. I tried in every issue to provide fact and opinion not available elsewhere in the press.

Anyway, this “Best of” collection is available in a Kindle edition as well as regular paper editions. I flagged a couple of other items as well. Check those ads to the right. And have fun reading.