A few years before the Blogosphere took off, Matt Drudge arrived on the scene as its harbinger. He was of course, instantly reviled by elite liberal journalists, who were feeling--at least subliminally--the ground shifting under their feet. But there was even earlier one-man news gatherer whom they did respect, immensely. As Jonah Goldberg wrote in January of 2000:

I’m thinking of a journalist who works alone, without editors, accountable to no one. Many feel he has an ax to grind, but he is read furtively by government workers and journalists. Often, he levels wild accusations against public officials of broad conspiracies he cannot prove. He lifts much of his material from other publications and adds his own interpretation. He calls the mainstream press "collaborationists" with the President.

Can you guess? Most people today would say Matt Drudge, the Internet columnist. But Drudge evokes nothing but scorn from the establishment press, while the guy I’m thinking of was called a "journalist’s journalist" by ABC’s Peter Jennings. The Los Angeles Times hailed him as "the conscience of investigative journalism." The New York Times’ Anthony Lewis praised him as "the reporter who taught us to penetrate the squid-ink of official truth."

His name was I.F. Stone (1907-1989), and he won fame editing, writing, and publishing I.F. Stone’s Weekly. Unlike Drudge, Stone was a man of the Left, labeling himself a "Jeffersonian Marxist."

A dozen years ago Stone's reputation was rocked when a retired KGB officer seemed to finger Stone as a paid agent of the Soviet Union. MacPherson evidently went to great pains to disprove this charge, and in her book she triumphantly claims to have done so. But, as Paul Berman explains in a fascinating review of her book (and a new collection of Stone's writing), MacPherson "seems not to notice that in her ardor to rescue Stone from his enemies, she has yanked the rope a little too firmly and has accidentally hanged the man."

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So Stone didn't work for the totalitarian government in Moscow. He merely "performed tasks" for the Soviet Union for free, out of conviction. I confess that in the past, I have described Stone as a paid agent. That wasn't true. What he was, though, was every bit as despicable.

Update: A Cornerite comes to Izzy's defense.

Another Update: "Of course, everyone is allowed to change his mind. What was missing from Stone during his lifetime was some candor about what made him swerve so radically from one view of Israel to another. But when we think back on Stone's Soviet boosterism, even during the worst of Stalin's crimes, we are reminded that candor was not always his strong suit."