Eugene McCarthy dies

Eugene McCarthy dies

One of the great ones, who wound up a prophet without honor - overshadowed first by Bobby Kennedy, then by George McGovern. And he sadly drifted into irrelevance with increasingly quixotic campaigns over the years.

I interviewed him the last time he ran, in 1992, and by then the slow degenerative process that ended today was already taking hold. I was really torn about what to do with the halting, stumbling tape that contained moments of the old brilliance.

I cleaned up my audio for brevity all the time; Chuck Grassley has a lot of articulated "uh"s and Tom Harkin has taight himself to say "quite frankly" at those kinds of pauses. And those add up in a 20 second news bite.

But for Gene McCarthy I cleaned up the audio for an entire ten minute interview piece to make him sound more articulate, less halting. I did it out of respect for who he had once been and what he had accomplished. So what's the journalistic ethics of that?

And even the day he died, he's overshadowed by another great social critic - Richard Pryor.