Media Show Their True Colors

Re your piece on Joe Klein and his colleagues’ reactions to the revelation that he is the author of the novel “Primary Colors” (“When a Journalist Lies, Should It Be Forgiven?” July 22): What a spectacle. TV commentators, columnists and magazine editors all up on their moral hind legs making a pompous blather about someone who wrote an entertainingly bitchy book and elegantly snookered them all.

Joe Klein waited too long to admit his guilt, they say, forgetting that Colin Powell waited until after his book tour to announce he wasn’t running for anything. But then Powell was only a general, not a journalist.

That guffaw you hear from the opposite coast is the ghost of A.J. Liebling.

RAYMOND B. WALTERS

Los Angeles