If He Can Make It There
Steinberg made it clear in his debut Daily News column, on February 13, that he sees himself that way too. He addressed a New York concern–the scratching of Wal-Mart at that city’s gates–by calling the chain the “Red China of corporate America–an enormous fascist beast rising to its feet and searching for new worlds to conquer.” He ingeniously manipulated the death of Arthur Miller into an occasion to insult his new opposition–the New York Times and the New York Post–as hopelessly thick-witted. And he introduced himself.
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Steinberg went on to tell his new readers about his grandfather, a Bronx sign painter, and his father, who moved to Ohio and didn’t look back. “But I did. All my life. I felt restless and exiled, the only Jew in school, rising grudgingly to my feet to make the annual ‘This is a dreidel, this is a menorah’ speech. What I’m trying to say is that I’m glad to be here, if only in print form. Delighted at this toehold in New York City, to have finagled a few square inches of its most coveted real estate, this spot in the Daily News. No rag-wrapped immigrant kissing the ground ever felt happier to arrive in town.”
When we talked by phone, Cooke raved about Steinberg’s “New York sensibility” and said his first two columns “give you goose bumps, they’re so good.” Cooke went on, “He’s got the wit and the intelligence and the punch, but he’s also got the scholarship.” Asked what Cooke’s new staff thinks about the new voice, he replied, “At least he’s not being burned in effigy. They seem to like him, which I’m told is quite unusual.”
Last week a panel of three federal appellate judges handed Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine another stinging defeat. The panel unanimously upheld the decision of a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to hold them in contempt for refusing to honor a grand jury subpoena. If you don’t like to see reporters locked up for protecting sources, that’s bad news. I’ll get to the good news in a moment.
So the good news is that only one of the three judges denied reporters any federal common-law privilege whatsoever. Because Tatel believed there was a privilege that had to be overcome, he explained why Fitzgerald had overcome it. He bluntly told Miller and Cooper their case was terrible.
