Beam me up, Scotty.

• Author: Alter, Jonathan

SCOTTY: James B. Reston and the Rise and Fall of American Journalism by John F. Stacks Little, Brown & Co. $29.95

BY THE TIME I BEGAN WRITING A column in the early 1990s, Scotty Reston's example still held powerful sway over ambitious pundits--but not in the way Reston hoped. He had become a walking cliche, an object lesson in the dangers of cozy power relationships and mood-of-the-capital bromides. While an earlier generation of political journalists wanted to be Reston, mine wanted to avoid being him.

This, I knew even then, was deeply unfair to Reston and his career. Over 40 years, he published an astonishing number of major scoops, and his analytical batting average was high: Through most of Scotty: James B. Reston and the Rise and Fall of American Journalism, John F. Stacks judiciously explains Reston's contributions and shortcomings and rightly places him near the center of almost every significant chapter of postwar American history. Only Walter Lippmann was a more influential 20th century newspaper columnist. Then, at the end, Stacks tries to take some of it away, suggesting Reston became corrupted by his proximity to power.

That feels forced, as if Stacks needs to accentuate the worst in order to carry the baggage of his larger, tacked-on theme about the decline of journalism. It also muddies his basic point, which is that we have lost something important with the transition from thoughtful Reston-style journalism to the shout culture of the news business today. My own feeling is that we were too hard on Reston in the 1970s and 1980s. He's looking awfully good by comparison to the pooh-bahs of the business today.

Stacks opens with the quintessential Reston story: Moments after being pummeled by Nikita Khrushchev at the 1961 Vienna summit, President Kennedy returns to the U.S. embassy to pour his heart out to Reston, who has been told to wait there for him. The rest of the press is miles away. Stacks makes a big point that such access is simply unimaginable today, no matter how famous the journalist. But that's not quite true. George F. Will was so Close to Ronald Reagan that he helped prepare him for the debates in 1980, then called him a "thoroughbred" on television. Sidney Blumenthal was closer to Bill Clinton while still a journalist than Reston was to any president. While no journalists are intimates of George W. Bush (he doesn't like 'em), many have been granted tremendous access to John McCain.

The larger point holds: The old...