NEW YORK (AP) — HBO’s new film on newspaper columnists Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill romanticizes an era in New York and journalism that feels like a long, long time ago.
The fact that it isn’t makes the documentary partly a tragedy.
The two men embodied a time when New York was a rollicking and complicated place, and each lived for the streets and stories of the little guys who made the city run. Every city had their own Breslins or Hamills, who made the powerful tremble and shake their fists. Their newspapers were required reading.
Yet a string of layoffs at media companies this week illustrates the peril faced by local journalism today that has made “truth to power” newspaper columnists an endangered species.
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