Dark Horses

FOR READERS of this journal, a book by pluperfect liberal David Halberstam must seem a very dark dark horse indeed. Yet Halberstam’s doorstopping study of the media, just issued in paperback, does have its useful moments.

The Powers That Be (Dell, $3.50) is, to be sure, gravely flawed. It is too long by half, and could have used some stringent editing; Halberstam has a penchant for breathless, fan-mag prose (everybody, it seems, is the best, or greatest, reporter, editor, broadcast mogul, or press lord of his generation); and his political ideas seem to have been lifted, without the humor, from a Jules Feiffer cartoon.

MS

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M. Stanton Evans

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FOR READERS of this journal, a book by pluperfect liberal David Halberstam must seem a very dark dark horse indeed. Yet Halberstam’s doorstopping study of the media, just issued in paperback, does have its useful moments.

The Powers That Be (Dell, $3.50) is, to be sure, gravely flawed. It is too long by half, and could have used some stringent editing; Halberstam has a penchant for breathless, fan-mag prose (everybody, it seems, is the best, or greatest, reporter, editor, broadcast mogul, or press lord of his generation); and his political ideas seem to have been lifted, without the humor, from a Jules Feiffer cartoon.