And not to forget.....

Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post.

In an age when Tom Cruise and Brittney Spears get more column space than the real issues, we may have forgotten what real news reporting was. We may have forgotten that there was a time when reporters did not regurgitate the White House press briefings and feed that pap to the masses. There was a time when reporters questioned and dug for the truth. There was a time when editors encouraged that reporting. There was a time when newspapers printed it.

I grew up reading the Washington Post. At 12 I was reading it cover to cover. By 16 I wanted to be a reporter. I wanted to go to college, major in journalism and minor in political science. To this day I kid that, if I had followed that dream, I could have been Woodward and Bernstein.

Maybe I would rather have been Bradlee.