Former DTH editor is W’s “blind scribe”
By now you might have heard about or seen the exchange President Bush had on Wednesday during a Rose Garden news conference with L.A. Times reporter Peter Wallsten. What you may not know is that Wallsten, a Chapel Hill native, was editor of the DTH 1992-93, his junior year at UNC.
Wallsten actually was the longest-serving DTH editor in history because the year he served, the paper changed the way one became DTH editor from a campus-wide election to a more orderly selection process. Rather than being elected in February, the DTH editor is now selected in April. So Wallsten served from his February 1992 election until the the end of April 1993. As a senior, he served as president of the DTH Board of Directors.
It was not long after his graduation while in the first stop of his career at the St. Petersburg Times that he was diagnosed with Stargardt’s disease, a form of macular degeneration that causes progressive vision loss. But that didn’t slow Peter down. He became St. Pete’s youngest reporter ever to cover the statehouse in Florida, then jumped to the Miami Herald and finally landed where we all knew he’d end up — covering the White House for someone — in this case, the L.A. Times.
And the timing of his attention from W. could not have been better. He has a book coming out later this summer, and in 24 hours it had moved from about 500,000th on Amazon’s preorder list to 2,500th. He promises to arrange something in Chapel Hill on the book tour, probably in August, so stay tuned.
Kevin Schwartz, GM