One of the interview shows are our local NPR affiliate (WHYY in Philadelphia) is Radio Times. I am sometimes lucky and catch all or most of a good interview on the radio but I miss most of them on the air.

Most days there are 2 one hour interviews so it is really hard to keep up unless you listen to the radio a lot. So I usually listen to the ones I find most interesting by podcast.

This morning I listened to a podcast of the Radio Times interview with James Goodale on his book Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles. If you can get the podcast, it is well-worth a listen.

James Goodale was the New York Times general counsel at a time when the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the NY Times. The Pentagon Papers was classified Top Secret, although that classification now seems excessive. After internal discussions at the Times, the paper battled Richard Nixon’s Department of Justice for the right to publish and won.

So this is an insider’s story of what may have been the most important case on First Amendment and freedom of the press. The interview and his book also talk about ‘freedom of the press’ issues arising since then. For much of the interview, he talked about the excessive amount of secrecy in the Obama administration and the unfortunate toll that takes on a free press.

Looking at the Amazon page, it seems there that both Kindle and Paperback Editions and the Kindle version is much less than the paperback.

The reviews on Amazon are great and I find this topic interesting and important so as soon as I finish this I plan to download the Kindle version. Whenever I’ve ordered a Kindle book in the past, it appears within seconds on my Kindle.