When I was a young freelancer for the Village Voice's music pages in the early 1980s, Alexander Cockburn wrote the brutal, hysterical Press Clips column with James Ridgeway, putting light on the liars. These were the Voices height of heights: Christgau on the music pages, Andrew Sarris films, Nat Hentoff politics, Arthur Bell gossip -the list is endless.
I would run into Cockburn at the VV office occasionally, but my one dealing with him, I wanted to get an interview with him for East Village Eye, didn't go that well.
That notwithstanding, if you take music out of the equation my fave journalists are Julie Burchill, Gore Vidal and Alexander Cockburn.
In 1984 Cockburn was suspended from the Voice for accepting $10,000 from an Arab group. Cockburn said the money was for a book deal and quit the paper. The Voice in 2012 is nothing much, and you can detail its downfall from that exact moment.
Cockburn continued his career with the Nation and his own broadsheet "Counter-Punch".
According to the Boston Herald: "Alexander reveled in being a troublemaker, and his provocative, polemical, elegant style usually engaged us and his reporting and analysis opened windows onto under-unreported news," Vanden Heuvel, the Nation’s editor and publisher, said in an e-mail to the Los Angeles Times. "I often felt I wasn’t doing my job right if we didn’t get a dozen or so subscription cancelations as a result of some Cockburn column."
Here is his link to New York Times obituary of the great writer, he will be missed, he will be increasingly difficult to replace: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/nyregion/alexander-cockburn-left-wing-writer-dies-at-71.html