Pete Hamill on A.J. Liebling

Speaking of the Other Paper, two of the more distinguished people who have written there over the years are Ben Bagdikian, best known for his landmark work The Media Monopoly, and a young A.J. Liebling [above, left], who went on to become the father of modern press criticism.

Liebling took a somewhat different view of local politics than Ed Achorn. As Johnny Apple wrote in 1998:

If sleaze remains a local art form, well, nobody gets very upset. Perhaps Roger Williams's sermons on tolerance have echoed down the generations. A. J. Liebling, who began his journalistic career here, wrote about his days in Providence, ''There was nothing you could do about anything, but then nothing was so bad that you felt a burning urge to do anything about it.''

But I digress.

Pete Hamill is another great journalistic institution, in New York, and Columbia Journalism Review has a podcast of a talk that he recently devoted to Liebling (h/t Romenesko).