Sandy Hume
American journalist
Alexander Britton Hume Jr. (September 2, 1969 – February 23, 1998), known as Sandy Hume, was an American journalist. He worked for The Hill newspaper in Washington, D.C. He was the son of Brit Hume (former Fox News Channel managing editor) and Clare Jacobs Stoner.
Career
Born and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Hume attended Middlebury College in Vermont, lettered in varsity lacrosse for the Panthers, and graduated with honors. He embarked on a career in journalism, and broke the story of the aborted 1997 "coup" by U.S. Rep. Bill Paxon (R-NY) against Speaker Newt Gingrich. Another of the plotters, Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX), reportedly scuttled the coup when he learned that Paxon, and not he, would replace Gingrich.
Veteran Washington reporter and commentator Robert Novak called Hume's Republican coup story "perhaps the greatest expose of behind-the-scenes Capitol Hill machinations that I had seen in half a century of Congress-watching." When Republican spin-doctors claimed that they merely wanted to warn Gingrich about the "coup", Novak wrote that "after extensive checking of sources, I am convinced that Hume's reporting was 100 percent correct." Brit Hume stated that Sandy Hume posted Novak's confirmation column on his wall. When Sandy Hume died in 1998 at age 28, he had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and had been pursued by U.S. News and Fox News.
Death
Hume died by suicide in his apartment in Arlington, Virginia.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Sandy Hume” as american journalist. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american journalist. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7417309. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969, 1998 and 1997.
A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sandy Hume” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.