Tony Award nominee: ‘Journalists have an inflated sense of their own importance’

Actor John Lithgow could win a Tony Award Sunday night for his role as Joseph Alsop in “The Columnist”:

I’ve played four journalists over the years, including Walter Burns in “The Front Page,” one of the really great stage characters of the 20th century. Ah, journalists. Everybody is involved in the drama of journalism, the day’s events. All of us read something or watched something this morning about what’s going on in politics. And journalists are the ones who tell those stories and they feel this tremendous compulsion to be near the action. That makes them great dramatic characters. Journalists have an inflated sense of their own importance, which is justified. But it certainly made Joe Alsop into a larger-than-life character.