The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Lost and Found: Coming of Age in the Washington Press Corps by Ellen Hume captures the idealism of a young reporter, from her early days as a cub in California, moving to the L.A. Times and its Washington Bureau, and her intuitive skills in ferreting out the truth behind the headlines and press releases.  As she got traction, she moved on to the Wall Street Journal, broadening her contacts and sources in the political world, fighting the ingrained sexism of the news media establishment, and unearthing the hypocrisies in centers of political power.

She embraced the aphorism which guided my profession as a journalist, namely, that the mission was “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”  (Chicago Evening Post editorialist and humorist Peter Finley Dunne had put the original line in the mouth of his fictional wise bartender, Mr. Dooley.) Increasingly it is the comfortable who have the power to call the shots regarding what to cover in the news and how to present it. She also reflects on the compromises that are made when writers are having dinners and socializing regularly with those whom they are covering.

Full disclosure: Ellen is a friend, one whom I admired from afar before I met her personally. While she is a little younger than I, I took delight in this book because so many of our experiences overlapped. Hers, of course, were on a larger landscape. So much resonated. When she was pounding shoe leather covering the nuclear event at Three Mile Island, I was involved in a program debating the fate of nuclear power for The Advocates on PBS.  We both cut our Washington reportorial teeth covering Jimmy Carter’s Presidency. She accompanied her husband, John Shattuck, when he became U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic, and I smiled at her observation of how previous ambassador Shirley Temple Black’s dog had stained the expensive carpet in the palatial ambassador’s residence.  My husband and I had met that dog, a gassy boxer, when we spent an evening with then-chain-smoking ambassador Black in Prague, along with other editorialists in 1990.

We were both lucky to be in journalism before the market was fragmented by cable, the onslaught of Fox News brand of tabloid journalism, and the ugliness of social media, which is inherently inimical to the dispassionate discussion of civic issues. The idea of “alternative facts” was not a serious reality. And working in the media in the post-Watergate era conferred on practitioners a sense of important mission.

Hume worked for the dominant national print media. In what passed for the Golden Era of broadcast journalism, there were just three networks, NBC, CBS and ABC. On the local level, I had the advantage of working for the dominant station in the region, with a potential market every night of three million viewers.  Back then, in print and broadcast, there was a firewall between straight news and opinion writing, which many readers and viewers failed to understand, but a journalist could make a difference on both sides of that divide.

Hume also had a major impact in academia.  She taught at Central European University in Hungary, at MIT and Harvard. She was one of 12 commissioners of the White House Commission om Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. She remains a civic activist today.

The beauty of Hume’s memoir is her candor about her struggles in a male-dominated profession, the sometimes- insurmountable stresses a high-pressured job can place on a marriage, the pitfalls when one makes mistakes, and the disillusionment that happens when an institution or a source lets you down.  She is also honest about the perks of access to people in high places and the gratification of celebrity. And she is clear-eyed and passionate about the failures of journalism today and the hopes she places in young and aspiring journalists upon whom democracy depends.

This book is nearly 600 pages, but Hume’s chapters are short and her writing is lively. I tore though it in six days and enjoyed every moment.