Many lovely tributes have been written to Charles Peters, the Washington Monthly’s founder, who passed away at 96 on Thanksgiving Day. They captured his brilliant editorial vision, unorthodox ideas about liberalism, unique (ahem) temperament, and eye for talent. Charlie trained a whole generation of young reporters who went on to careers at the commanding heights of journalism, including James Fallows, Jon Meacham, David Ignatius, Nicholas Lemann, Katherine Boo, Amy Waldman, and Michelle Cottle.
The part of Charlie’s vision that touched me most was his injunction against letting our writing be warped by our prior convictions or wanting to win approval (even unconsciously) from our own social group. When I was a young editor at the magazine in 1986-87, he taught that we should be willing to “say good things about the bad guys, and bad things about the good guys.” Today, our entire media system—both the ratings-driven and the algorithm-driven media—penalizes that kind of heterodox thinking. But decades of Monthly editors and writers tried to carry that intellectual honesty—relentlessly challenging one’s own priors—onto the mainstream media outlets we moved to in our careers.
I certainly tried to as a correspondent for Newsweek, then as co-founder of Beliefnet (a multi-faith religion site), Report for America (a national service nonprofit that places and supports reporters in local newsrooms), and Rebuild Local News (which advocates public policies to save local news).
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But one of the most admirable aspects of Charlie’s legacy is not what happened while he was editor but what has happened since. A great measure of an entrepreneur’s success is whether their creation lives on and even evolves into something better.
When Paul Glastris took over the magazine in 2001, the spirit of idealism and great reporting persisted, but the nature of its impact changed. Under Charlie, the Monthly’s most significant influence was arguably on journalism itself—on how the press covers Washington. Under Paul, its most profound impact has been on public policy.
For instance, fighting monopolies is now a central plank of the Biden administration’s economic agenda. That’s a direct result of muckraking antimonopoly stories the Monthly started publishing more than a dozen years ago—some of which were written by Lina Khan, now chair of the Federal Trade Commission and Biden’s most prominent antitrust enforcer. The Washington Monthly’s innovative college rankings spurred the federal government, first under Obama and now under Biden, to crack down on predatory for-profit colleges and to publish data on how much students at specific colleges go on to earn. The Monthly’s early and relentless advocacy of voting by mail laid the groundwork for a vast expansion of that electoral innovation when the Covid epidemic threatened the 2020 elections.
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The modern Washington Monthly has also continued to train young reporters with a fervor for original thinking and honest analysis. The list of prominent journalists who worked at or wrote for the Monthly under Paul include Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic; Nicholas Confessore, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The New York Times; Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the most influential thinkers about race of our era; Haley Sweetland Edwards, author and former deputy Washington Bureau Chief of Time (who’s now back at the Monthly); and Josh Marshall, the founder of TalkingPointsMemo. Even the interns have gone on to do astonishing work (witness Ezra Klein, co-founder of Vox Media and now columnist/podcaster for The New York Times).
The Monthly had an amazing 32 years under Charlie Peters. It’s been just as remarkable for the past 22 years under Paul Glastris. Given the stakes of the next election—and beyond—it’s essential that this unusual institution continues to push forward with great journalism and ideas that will change America.
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