Donald Ritchie offers a vibrant chronicle of news coverage in our nation's capital, from the early days of radio and print reporting and the heyday of the wire services to the brave new world of the Internet. Beginning with 1932, when a newly elected FDR energized the sleepy capital, Ritchie highlights the dramatic changes in journalism that have occurred in the last seven decades. We meet legendary columnists--including Walter Lippmann, Joseph Alsop, and Drew Pearson --as well as the great investigative reporters, from Paul Y. Anderson to the two green Washington Post reporters who launched the political story of the decade--Woodward and Bernstein. We read of the rise of radio news--fought tooth and nail by the print barons--and of such pioneers as Edward R. Murrow, H. V. Kaltenborn, and Elmer Davis. Ritchie also offers a vivid history of TV news, from the early days of Meet the Press, to Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite, to the cable revolution led by C-SPAN and CNN. In addition, he compares political news on the Internet to the alternative press of the '60s and '70s; describes how black reporters slowly broke into the white press corps (helped mightily by FDR's White House); discusses path-breaking woman reporters such as Sarah McClendon and Helen Thomas, and much more. From Walter Winchell to Matt Drudge, the people who cover Washington politics are among the most colorful and influential in American news. Reporting from Washington offers an unforgettable portrait of these figures as well as of the dramatic changes in American journalism in the twentieth century.

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"Follows up on 450 Washington journalists first interviewed in 1978, analyzing career patterns and challenges faced by generation, gender, minority status, news medium, and employer. Explores whether subjects rose within their organization, moved from reporter to editor or from one medium to another, or left journalism and if so, why and for what kind of career"--

"Relates in detail the biggest stories the author has been involved with in the last twenty-five years--ranging from private evening with presidents to the hectic eighteen-hour days in the milling crowds on the floor at national conventions, from traveling around the world with Vice-President Johnson to accompanying Pat Nixon on her trip around the world, from the beats she scored to the scoops she missed. Above all, her account is replete with amusing and revealing anecdotes about four presidents--Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford--at work and at play, with heretofore untold particulars about certain puzzling incidents (for instance, exactly why LBJ was chosen as JFK's running mate in 1960, and the reason why Nixon went out to the Lincoln Memorial in the middle of the night to talk to peace demonstrators after the Cambodian incursion in 1970). Interlaced with such stories, Mrs. Dickerson gives a glimpse of just what day-to-day life is like in the capital, and how the nation's business is conducted not only in committee rooms and on the floor of Congress, but in candlelit dining rooms in Georgetown and on country weekends. She is equally candid about her private life, including her beaus during her early years in Washington (JFK and Scoop Jackson, among others); her marriage to C.W. Dickerson and their purchase of Merrywood, where Gore Vidal and Jackie and Lee Bouvier grew up; as well as stories about her own children and an insider's formula on the art of entertaining in Washington."--Jacket flap.