Here’s Bernard Goldberg, formerly of CBS television, and the author of various indignant (but funny) book-length screeds  We talked in 2009 at which time he had “nothing against Barack Obama,” but much against the press’s love affair with him. Apart from Goldberg’s contempt for his former colleagues, he conveys strong admiration (verging on secular apotheosis) for Obama at the very beginning of his presidency.

Between his fascination with Obama and his contempt for his erstwhile colleagues in the press (particularly “electronic”). But that was in 2008. From his grudging admiration for Obama shortly after the election and his continuing contempt for much of the print and electronic press,  he went on from this broadcast occasion, to became one of the most critical of the Fox News commentators.

The recent death at 93 of Ben Bradlee, the former editor of the Washington Post, led us back to this 1995 conversation when he revealed some surprising things about Watergate, Woodward, Bernstein, and their key source known as “Deep Throat.” He played his role as well or better than did Jason Robards in the movie about those events.

Ira Berkow of the New York Times was the most interesting sports writer we ever encountered – not merely for his knowledge of the technical sides of baseball, tennis, football, etc. – but because of his great skill in painting verbal portraits of the performers, brilliant, superhuman, eccentric, or merely human. Essentially he was a novelist let loose upon the field and in the ring. Here he is in a 2002 tale-telling session.

Jean Shepherd fully deserved that title. He is long gone but much remembered by fans who hear fragments of the Shepherd style in some of the best of the ad-lib broadcasters today. Here we talk with his biographer Eugene Begmann in 2005 and then get a smashing excerpt from Shepherd waking up night-time New York.

The obituarist here is the great Mark Steyn. When not contemplating the dishonesty of the left and the decline of western civilization, he writes some of the most interesting and most entertaining obituaries ever published. Here he is visiting with us in 2007 and chatting about various exemplary and appalling recently concluded lives including Ronald Reagan, Princess Margaret, Idi  Amin, Bob Hope, the son of Benito Mussolini, and the guy who invented Cool Whip.