Arianna Huffington and Harry Shearer

There is an obituary writer at the NY Times, and I wish his name came to mind at this moment, who has the knack of not sugar-coating the lives of people he writes about, but of rendering fully dimensional portraits of them that make you say, after reading one of his pieces, "Gee, I don't wish necessarily I had that person's life, but what an interesting life it was."

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The point I forgot to make on Larry King, because I was anxious to hurry off and attend a Museum of Radio & TV dinner honoring Dan Rather (how's that for anchor-dropping?), is that since the police already presume to know who killed Phil Hartman, excessive coverage of the story at this point is not in the tradition of crime journalism, but in the newer tradition of celebritainment--anything about anybody famous trumps any other news, period, paragraph.

Harry Shearer

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