MIKE PESCA: Fifteen years ago this summer, American journalism lost one of its greatest practitioners, Isador Feinstein Stone, byline I.F. Stone, known to friends as Izzy. Stone worked at papers large and small in the 1930s. He was the Washington editor of The Nation magazine in the '40s, and in 1953, out of a job, and with his name on a Senate list of "typical sponsors of Communist front organizations," he launched I.F. Stone's Weekly, right out of his house. Before long, what was called a highly personal radical publication established itself as a must-read for Washington insiders. On the Media's Megan Ryan looks back at the work of I.F. Stone.

MEGAN RYAN: This summer, as news organizations reconsider their coverage in the run-up to war, I.F. Stone's reporting offers an object lesson. According to Victor Navasky, now publisher of The Nation, Stone's M.O. was different from any other Washington correspondent.

VICTOR NAVASKY: He declined to go to any off-the-record briefing, and he'd hang out outside, and then he'd talk to the people who heard it, [LAUGHS] and he wasn't bound by any off-the-record rules. He wouldn't accept what they told him. He then would go and check it out. He got scoop after scoop that way, and they were sort of -- they were the opposite of insider journalism. They were kind of an outsider's putting things in context.

JACK NEWFIELD: I.F. Stone said "Don't go to anybody's house. Don't become friends with anybody. Don't become a captive of your sources.

MEGAN RYAN: That was his advice to Jack Newfield, author and longtime columnist for the Village Voice.

JACK NEWFIELD: "You don't need these big shots." He says. "I've never trusted anybody in the Cabinet. I've never listened to a presidential aide. Live like a monk. Be isolated. Just read the record. Government documents its own crimes."

MEGAN RYAN: Newfield, who was a student in the leftist group Students for a Democratic Society when he first met Stone, said his approach comes directly out of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, and perhaps, practical necessity.

JACK NEWFIELD: He said "Well, it's partly involuntary. My hearing is so bad, I can't hear what people whisper to me at fancy cocktail parties, and I can't hear what witnesses say at congressional hearings."

MEGAN RYAN: But he could read. In Navasky's words, "Stone was an investigative reader. He read and read to the last word of every public document, uncovering stories hiding in plain sight." Here's how Stone explained it to Bernard Kalb in a 1971 interview.

I.F. STONE: Well, I'd build a file, a temporary file. I'd read off a lot of papers and try to read the record, and I'd try to read the hearings, and when I spot something interesting, I run downtown, ask a question, make a phone call, try to talk to people a bit. I try to do some research. I try to provide fresh perspective and radical perspective and independent perspective on the news.

MEGAN RYAN: Of course, attending briefings, rubbing shoulders with the powerful and using deep background sources are all useful practices. They generate the stories that fill the front page and powerful exposes from Watergate to the horrors at Abu Ghraib. But according to Todd Gitlin of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Stone's way was very different. Gitlin calls it "second order journalism," scrutinizing the reporting of others.

TODD GITLIN: In other words, the sort of critical enterprise that Izzy Stone was responsible for was symbiotic with good journalism -- looking for consistencies and inconsistencies, juxtaposing the claims made by different news organizations, treating the news, in short, as something other than sacred text -- dis-assembling it.

MEGAN RYAN: Victor Navasky remembers how Stone worked a big story in 1957, when test ban negotiations were going on between the U.S. and Russia. The official line from the government was that the underground nuclear tests conducted in the United States would be undetectable 200 miles from the site of the blast. But Stone, reading to the last word of every dispatch, knew it just wasn't true.

VICTOR NAVASKY: He noticed, in a so-called "shirt tail," one of these little paragraphs that appears after the main story -- unrelated to it -- filed from the AP -- not by the writer of the original story -- that Geiger counters, or whatever the machinery was that picks up these tremors, were registering hundreds and thousands of miles away. So he started calling around, and then he went up to the Bureau of Standards, and he got a major scoop out of this which became a front page story, cause he then went back to the Defense Department, and they had to confirm that their original statement was wrong, and they changed the press release they put out, and so he not only reported news, he made news.

MEGAN RYAN: There was a lesson to be learned from this and many classic I.F. Stone stories, and it resonates today in the work of every journalist who Stone mentored. Jack Newfield.

JACK NEWFIELD: Well Izzy is, is the person who taught me that all governments lie.

MEGAN RYAN: Bernard Kalb talked to Stone about government lies when he interviewed him in 1971, after the New York Times had run with the Pentagon Papers. [TAPE PLAYS]

BERNARD KALB: Who were the liars in your point of view?

I.F. STONE: Well, Lyndon Johnson, above all. There's just no doubt that Lyndon Johnson lied to the press. They didn't need access to the White House private papers to know what every reporter in this town knows -- how often Lyndon gave false impressions to us at press conferences. Very false impressions.

BERNARD KALB: False impressions. Lies?

I.F. STONE: Sure. What other word is there for false impressions? I mean if you, you catch a guy in front of a bank, and he just robbed a vault and you say what are you doing there and he said I'm waiting for a streetcar, and yes, he was waiting for a streetcar, but he's just robbed a bank -- he didn't tell you that part of it -- is he a liar, or just - is he just a man who's given you an incomplete briefing? Which is it?

MEGAN RYAN: Izzy's dis-engagement with the powerful enabled him to ask questions like that, and lately, we see the consequences of not asking. In July, the New York Times editorial page took a cold, hard look at its own pre-war coverage and concluded, quote, "We did not listen carefully to the people who disagreed with us. Our certainty flowed from the fact that such an overwhelming majority of government officials, past and present, top intelligence officials and other experts were sure that the weapons were there. We had a group think of our own." Just a week ago, the Washington Post gave their media reporter, Howard Kurtz, a page one platform to criticize their own pre-war coverage. Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks is quoted, saying "There was an attitude among editors: 'Look. We're going to war. Why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?'" Here's what Stone said in 1971 about the coverage of the Vietnam War.

I.F. STONE: I'm making a blanket indictment about Washington. This has been the best-covered war we were ever in. The coverage from the field has been superb. But here in Washington, on the whole, the press crowd has been a big herd which has been committed to the government, involved in propaganda, and didn't even know it. A lot of these people, you see, they think they're being objective. They really think so, when what they're really doing is accepting the conventional wisdom, the pre-conceptions and premises of the government as gospel without even realizing it. [TAPPING FOR EMPHASIS] A man has to come clean with his readers. You have to show where you're committed. You have to show your point of view.

MEGAN RYAN: Izzy held deep political convictions, but he believed, most of all, in full disclosure of the government and of himself. That passion fueled his reporting and sharpened his vision, allowing him to see past his colleagues on the major stories of his time. As early as 1942, he described the actions of Nazi Germany as "a murder of a people so appalling that men would shudder at its horrors for centuries to come." He was ahead in covering McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. He reveled in the pursuit of truth, and when Jack Newfield asked him if he liked what he did, Stone said "I have so much fun, I ought to be arrested." For On the Media, I'm Megan Ryan.