Robert M. Smith - Suppressed: Confessions of a Former New York Times Washington Correspondent

Carly Wipf, my assistant, kept me and the book goingindefatigably and with an enthusiastic editors eyeto the end. I cannot fathom why she wants to be a reporter.

Eric Fox spared the schoolmasters rod but dispensed wondrous syntactical and analytic advice. Its an important book, he would fib as the chapters showed themselves.

Susanne Kirk, an editor for decades at the hallowed Scribner, watched with unflagging humor and reassurance as the drama of a book critical of the Times (with its feared Book Review) and the first-glance (but wrong) impression of pro-Trumpism took rebellious shape, found a big-time agent, and then a publisher. From one end to the other, Mississippi watched Susie shaking her head and laughing, as she pressed me to finish. Its a good book, she fibbed as more chapters appeared.

Sarah Wallace Rosenbloom is an extraordinary, old-fashioned (What do you like to read?) librarian reared in Texas, who has managed, or help manage, libraries from the London School of Economics to a city in Iowa. Her Baker Street Irregulars of head librarians everywhere kindly provided, with their digital skills, researchgift-wrapped in encouragement.

Former colleagues at the New York Times made inestimable contributions, all with the usual NFA guaranteenot for attribution. I honor that pledge, and them.

Not least, Emilio spent many hours on his mat next to my computer deskall the while bravely risking a bushy tail dangerously close to a desk chair on wheels. He calmed me with the placid snoring of a ragdoll when he expertly judged that I needed calming and urgently encouraged me to hasten when mealtime approached.

All errors of substance or style are mine alone.

The inside-dopester is competent in the way that the mass media have taught him to be. Ideology demands that, living in a politically saturated milieu, he knows the political score as he must know the score in other fields such as sports.

D AVID R IESMAN

There were so many insiders that, it seemed, there were no outsiders.

D AVID G RANN IN THE N EW Y ORKER

If you dont read the newspaper, youre uninformed. If you read the newspaper, youre mis-informed.

M ARK T WAIN

The Spike was the dangerously sharp needle on the desk in front of the editor. The editor impaled on it the stories that, for one reason or another, werent going to make it into the paper.

Early on in my career, I developed a dozen hints for people who read newspapers and want to understand them better: