Thursday morning, July 26th, at 9:00 am I will be hosting a show called "The Advocates" on WVOX-AM radio, 1460 AM My guest is the distinguished journalist Jonathan Alter, of Newsweek and a frequent political commentator on NBC and MSNBC. Our topic will be his book "The Defining Moment" The First Hundred Days of the FDR Administration, March 4, 1933.
For a decade in the 1980s, Alter was Newsweek's media critic, where he was among the first in the mainstream media to break tradition and hold other news organizations accountable for their coverage,a precursor to the role later played by blogs. When Newsweek launched his wide-ranging column in 1991, it was the first time the magazine allowed regular political commentary in the magazine, other than on the back page. After the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, during which Alter was a consultant to MTV, he was among a small group of reporters and columnists who had regular access to Clinton, though he was far from a reliable supporter, particularly during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. "Alter bites me in the ass sometimes, but at least he knows what we're trying to do," Clinton was quoted as saying in the book Media Circus by The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz.
Alter gained international notoriety on election night 2000, when on NBC with Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw, he claimed that the election would be settled in court. He was the first pundit to predict the months long recount process.
Two months after the September 11 attacks, Alter wrote an article for Newsweek called "Time to think about torture" which became one of his best-known articles.[15] In the column, he suggested that the U.S. might need to "rethink ... old assumptions about law enforcement". Stating that "some torture clearly works", he suggested the nation should "keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation", and consider transferring some prisoners to other countries with less stringent rules on torture.
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