William Safire

(Newser) - Elder statesmen of the media like Walter Cronkite and William Safire are dropping at an alarming rate, and their replacements need to step up, writes Peggy Noonan. Ranters on the right and the left—like MSNBC's Ed Schultz, who says Republicans "want to see you dead"—are proliferating,...

(Newser) - Bill Safire, to use the phrase he coined, was anything but a "nattering nabob of negativity," writes his New York Times "colleague in columny" Maureen Dowd. The former Nixon speechwriter—who once told Dowd he had been frozen out by the Times' liberal writers until he...

(Newser) - Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist William Safire died today outside Washington, the paper reports. He was 79 and suffered from cancer. A onetime speechwriter for Richard Nixon, Safire, a self-described "libertarian conservative," used his background as a reporter and love for English usage to punch up his...