Lars-Erik Nelson

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Lars-Erik Nelson (1941-2000) was best known for his syndicated column in The New York Daily News. His work also appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Nation Magazine, Mother Jones, Foreign Affairs, among others, and his column ran in newspapers across the country.

While Nelson was questioning Newt Gingrich at at a Sperling Breakfast in November 1995, Gingrich admitted that he had shut down the federal government because Bill Clinton had made him sit at the back of Air Force One. The infamous Daily News “Cry Baby” cover story ran the following day.^[1]

Lars’s name has recently come up in the press for his observations about Don Imus’s humor. http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/they-were-warned-by-digby-as-media.html

Just a few months before his death, Lars was a guest on "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" and said this about The New York Times’s coverage of Wen Ho Lee: “…Investigative reporting can be agenda-driven. The reporting team gets an idea in its head or they find a source, and they cease being skeptical because they're so delighted to have this insider source. Whitewater was a similar case where the Times believed the version told by Jim McDougal. I think you'll agree he was not a particularly good source. But Jim McDougal's version of Whitewater drove that case. Oddly enough, this is the same reporter in that case who did the Wen Ho Lee [series].” http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/july-dec00/times_9-26.html

In November 2000, Nelson broke the story that Katherine Harris, then-State Attorney General in Florida, was not a neutral participant in the Florida ballot controversy, but that she had been significantly involved in George W. Bush’s presidential campaign.^[2]