David Corn

David Corn (born February 20, 1959) is an American political journalist, author, the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, and perhaps best known as a cable television commentator.[1] He had previously been the Washington editor for The Nation and appeared regularly on FOX News, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and BloggingHeads.tv opposite various other media personalities. Corn appeared on FOX News more than sixty times, according to a tally by Politifact.com, before becoming a frequent commentator on MSNBC.[2]. As a result of his prominence from his cable television appearances, he has garnered as much as $12,000 for appearances and speeches, for addressing such topics as "What’s Right with the Left & What’s Wrong with the Right?” He is also a regular attendee of the White House Correspondents Dinner and he is longstanding member of the Gridiron Club.[3]


David Corn
Born (1959-02-20) February 20, 1959
EducationBrown University (BA)
OccupationJournalist, author
Known forWinner of George Polk Award for Journalism, 2012
Notable credit(s)
Chief of Washington bureau for Mother Jones; Washington editor for The Nation; appeared regularly on FOX News, MSNBC, and National Public Radio; frequent guest on Bloggingheads.tv
Spouse(s)Welmoed Laanstra
Children2
WebsiteOfficial website

In February 2013, he was named winner of the 2012 George Polk Award in journalism in the category of political reporting for his posting of a video and his reporting of the "47 percent story," Republican nominee Mitt Romney's videoed meeting with donors during the 2012 presidential campaign.[4]

Corn has also written nonfiction and fiction books that generally deal with government and politics. Corn has also been a book reviewer himself.

On one occasion, he criticized his own organization when Nation Books published the translation of a controversial French book on Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. Forbidden Truth: US-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden, by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, suggests that the attacks resulted from a breakdown in talks between the Taliban and the United States to run an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. Corn argued that publishing "contrived conspiracy theories" undermined his ability to expose actual governmental misbehavior. Others involved in the controversy argued that Corn was interfering with the First Amendment rights of both the author and publisher, and that Corn had the right to criticize it, but should not have tried to suppress its publication.[5]

Early life and education

Corn was raised in a Jewish family[6] in White Plains, New York.[7] He graduated from White Plains High School in 1977. He attended Brown University, where he majored in history and worked for The Brown Daily Herald.[7] After his junior year, he interned at The Nation where he accepted a job as editorial assistant instead of returning to finish his degree.[7] He earned his remaining credits at Columbia University and received a B.A. from Brown University in 1982.[7] He joined Mother Jones in 2007.[7]

Career

Books

Corn's first book was a 1994 biography of longtime Central Intelligence Agency official Ted Shackley, which received mixed reviews. The book used Shackley's climb through the CIA bureaucracy to illustrate how the Agency worked and to follow some of its Cold War-era covert operations. In The Washington Post, Roger Warner called it "an impressive feat of research"; but, in The New York Times, Joseph Finder asserted that Corn was seriously distorting history to blame Shackley for a series of institutional CIA failings and pointed out a series of serious errors in the book. Among them, Finder said, was that Corn "recycled a long-discredited canard, much beloved by conspiracy theorists, that on the day of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, the agency's chief of covert operations, Desmond FitzGerald, met in Paris with one of the C.I.A.'s Cuban agents and gave him a "ball-point pen" that could be used to inject Castro with a deadly toxin called Black Leaf 40. FitzGerald was actually the host of a lunch in Washington at the time, at the City Tavern Club in Georgetown."[8][9]

Corn contributed a short story to Unusual Suspects (1996), a paperback collection of original crime stories.[10]

His first and only novel, Deep Background, is a conspiracy thriller about the assassination of a president at a White House press conference and the ensuing investigation. Reviews praised Corn's mastery of the political atmosphere and characters, although they split on whether this was a virtue or, coming at the conclusion of Bill Clinton's term in office, already all-too-familiar territory. Reviewing the book in the New York Times, James Polk opinred that although the book's included dramatic scenes such as a "seedy nightspot catering to homosexual marines, an interagency hit squad, a high-class look, but don't touch escort service", the novel was not able to deliver "enough shocks left to sustain the genre."[11][12]

With the arrival of George W. Bush, Corn became a harsh critic of the President. His next book, The Lies of George W. Bush, alleged that Bush had systematically "mugged the truth" as a political strategy, and he found fault with the media for failing to report this effectively. The book also broke with journalistic practice for its explicit charge of lying, a word usually avoided as editorializing.[13][14] In particular, Corn criticized many of the arguments offered to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and he challenged New York Times columnist William Safire for claiming links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.[15] In Hubris, written with Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, Corn analyzed the Bush administration's drive toward the invasion.

Corn announced on The Rachel Maddow Show on September 12, 2017 that he and Michael Isikoff were working on a new book about the Donald Trump campaign and administration's ties with Russia and the Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential campaign, as well as a history of Russian tactics. Their book was released on March 13, 2018 and entitled Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump

The Plame Affair
Main article: Plame affair

Corn was personally involved in the early coverage of the controversy over leaks to the media of the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame. After Robert Novak revealed Plame's identity in his July 14, 2003, column, Corn was amont the first to report, several days later, that Plame had been working covertly;[16][17] He also raised the possibility that the leak of her identity violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, or IIPA. But prosecutors found no evidence that those government officials who leaked her name knew she was a covert agent, and no official was ultimately charged with violating the IIPA.[18]

Novak, for his part, disputed that Plame had been a covert operative at the time her identity was revealed. He also objected to the negative portrayal of himself in Hubris, the book in part about the matter by Corn nad Isikoff. Novak said of Corn, "Nobody was more responsible for bloating this episode." Novak felt that Corn was too close with former ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband and a key figure in criticism of the administration's arguments for invasion.[19]

However, in early 2007, an unclassified summary of Valerie Plame's employment history at the CIA was disclosed for the first time in a court filing which confirmed that Plame was indeed a covert operative at the time her name was made public by Novak.[20]

Mitt Romney "47 Percent" video and George Polk Award

In announcing Corn's being awarded the George Polk Award for 2012, the sponsors wrote:

David Corn of Mother Jones will receive the George Polk Award for Political Reporting... Through persistent digging and careful negotiation with a source, Corn secured a full recording of Romney at a $50,000-a-plate Florida fundraiser declaring that 47 percent of Americans — those who back President Obama — are “victims” who are “dependent upon government” and “pay no income tax.” Corn worked for weeks to obtain the recording... Furthermore, it was Corn’s extensive previous reporting on Romney that convinced the source to trust him with its release.[21]

David Corn's story that introduced the secret tape was published in Mother Jones on September 17, 2012.[22][23]

Workplace Conduct Issues

In Nov. 7, 2017, according to Politico, "Mother Jones magazine’s editor and chief executive acknowledged.. that they [had]investigated Washington bureau chief David Corn for inappropriate workplace behavior three years ago" and as a result, ended up "warning him about touching female staffers and insensitive descriptions of sexual violence." After additional new complaints, Mother Jones editors and they would now probe the new allegations as well: One woman who worked with Corn a "expressed concerns she had heard from other women in the Washington office made 'rape jokes','regularly gave [several women] unwelcome shoulder rubs and engaged in uninvited touching of their legs, arms, backs, and waists,” and “made inappropriate comments about women’s sexuality and anatomy.”

A second former female staffer claimed that Corn “came up behind me and put his hands and arms around my body in a way that felt sexual and domineering.”

Corn did not challenge the credibility of the women accusing him, responding instead by promising to do better and "make sure that it didn’t happen again." A senior editor of the magazine, Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, "told POLITICO she didn’t personally witness Corn touching any women, though she said her understanding was that such behavior, while perhaps considered a 'violation of space,' was not “in any way sexual in nature.” She further said Corn now appears “quite scrupulous about keeping physical distance because he realized it was in danger of being misinterpreted.” There have not been any further allegations made since Corn vowed to change his behavior.[24]

References
  1. "Observer". Archived from the original on October 6, 2008.
  2. Jon Greenberg. "Mother Jones reporter at center of Bill O'Reilly story: O'Reilly 'often' praised me ". Politifact, Feb. 26, 2015.
  3. Ken Silverstein. "David Corn: 47 Percent ÷ Liberal Bullshit = Boring Journalism". The New York Observer, Sept. 2, 2015.
  4. Monica Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery, "Mother Jones' David Corn Wins George Polk Award," Mother Jones, February 17, 2013.
  5. Rutten, Tim. "French 9/11 Theory Finds Voice in the U.S." Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2002, p. E1.
  6. Interfaith Family: "Politically Correct" Archived February 2, 2017, at the Wayback Machine by Nate Bloom. November 13, 2012
  7. Brown Alumni Magazine: "You Don't Have to Trust Me" by Stephanie Grace May/June 2013
  8. Warner, Roger. "The Spy as Bureaucrat." Washington Post, October 23, 1994, p. WBK1.
  9. Finder, Joseph. "The Spy in the Gray Flannel Suit." New York Times, October 23, 1994, p. A22.
  10. Weeks, Linton. "They Wrote the Book on Fund-Raising." Washington Post, May 15, 1996, p. B1.
  11. Whitten, Leslie H., Jr. (September 20, 1999), "Let the Secret Out: A Top-Notch Conspiracy Thriller", Washington Post: C2, archived from the original on March 29, 2015.
  12. Polk, James. "The West Wing." New York Times Book Review, October 10, 1999, p. 25.
  13. Geoffrey Hodgson. "Trust Buster." Washington Post, December 18, 2003, p. C3.
  14. Hertsgaard, Mark. "Chapter and verse on the need for regime change." Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2004, p. R3.
  15. Okrent, Daniel. "The Privileges of Opinion, the Obligations of Fact." New York Times, March 28, 2004, p. 4.2.
  16. Corn, David. "Nigergate Thuggery." The Nation, August 4, 2003.
  17. Toensing, Victoria. "What a Load of Armitage!" Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2006, p. A12.
  18. Howard Kurtz. "A Hot-Water Leak." Washington Post, October 1, 2003, p. C1.
  19. Novak, Robert, "Who Said What When: The rise and fall of the Valerie Plame 'scandal.'" The Weekly Standard, October 16, 2006.
  20. Seidman, Joel (May 29, 2007). "Plame was 'covert' agent at time of name leak". NBC News. Retrieved June 8, 2017.
  21. "LIU Announces 2012 George Polk Awards in Journalism" (press release), February 18, 2013.
  22. David Corn, "SECRET VIDEO: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters," Mother Jones, September 17, 2012 [retrieved February 20, 2013]
  23. For the story about how and why Corn obtained the tape, see Paul Farhi, "How Mother Jones got the Romney '47 percent' story," Washington Post, September 18, 2012.
  24. Joe Concha. "Mother Jones bureau chief David Corn investigated for inappropriate conduct". The Hill, Nov. 3, 2017.
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