Bio
David Corn is the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones magazine. As Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones, Corn supervises six reporters and writers covering politics and policy in the nation's capital. This team produces stories for the magazine and for Mother Jones' soon-to-be expanded website. Its mission is to generate news-breaking and reporting-driven articles and to provide insightful, fact-based analysis regarding the stories of the week (or day) and the stories uncovered or neglected by other media. Corn also writes for the magazine and the website and helps to direct Mother Jones' overall coverage.
Prior to that, he was the Washington editor of The Nation magazine for twenty years. He writes on a host of subjects, including politics, the White House, Congress, and the national security establishment. He has broken stories on George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Colin Powell, Rush Limbaugh, Enron, the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA leak case, corruption in Iraq, Senator David Vitter, the Pentagon, and assorted Washington players and institutions. He is a Fox News Channel commentator and a contributing editor for CQ.com. His daily blog, www.davidcorn.com, is a CQ.com blog. He also has blogged for HuffingtonPost.com and the "Comment Is Free" site of The Guardian.
He has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, Newsday, Harper's, The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Washington Monthly, the LA Weekly, the Village Voice, The Independent, Elle, Slate, Salon, TomPaine.com, Alternet.org, and other publications and websites.
He is the co-author (with Michael Isikoff) of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (Crown, 2006), a New York Times bestseller. The New York Times called the book "fascinating reading" and the most "comprehensive account" of the Bush administration's misleading sales campaign for the war. The Washington Post hailed Hubris as a book of "shocking clarity" and compared it favorably to Barbara Tuchman's classic March of Folly. Tom Brokaw of NBC News said, "Hubris is a bold and provocative book that will quickly become an explosive part of the national debate on how we got involved in Iraq."
His book, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown, 2003) was also a New York Times bestseller. The Washington Post called it "a serious case....[that] ought to be in voters' minds when they cast their ballots. A painstaking indictment."
His first novel, Deep Background, a political thriller, was published by St. Martin's Press in 1999. The Washington Post said it is "brimming with gusto....As clean and steely as an icy Pinot Grigio....[An] exceptional thriller." The Los Angeles Times called it "a slaughterhouse scorcher of a book you don't want to put down" and named it one of the best novels of the year. The New York Times said, "You can either read now or wait to see the movie....Crowded with fictional twists and revelations." The Chicago Tribune noted, "This dark, impressive political thriller...is a top-notch piece of fiction, thoughtful and compelling." PBS anchor Jim Lehrer observed that Deep Background is "a Washington novel with everything. It's a page-turning thriller from first word to last...that brings some of the worst parts of Washington vividly alive."
Corn was a contributor to Unusual Suspects, an anthology of mystery and crime fiction (Vintage/Black Lizard, 1996). His short story "My Murder" was nominated for a 1997 Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America. The story was republished in The Year's 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories (Carroll & Graf, 1997).
He is the author of the biography Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades (Simon & Schuster, 1994). The Washington Monthly called Blond Ghost "an amazing compendium of CIA fact and lore." The Washington Post noted that this biography "deserves a space on that small shelf of worthwhile books about the agency." The New York Times termed it "a scorchingly critical account of an enigmatic figure who for two decades ran some of the agency's most important, and most controversial, covert operations."
Corn has long been a prominent commentator on television and radio. He was a regular panelist on the weekly television show, Eye On Washington, which was syndicated on PBS stations across the United States. He has appeared on ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopoulos, The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes, On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, Crossfire, The Capital Gang, Fox News Sunday, Washington Week in Review, The McLaughlin Group, Hardball, C-SPAN's Washington Journal, and many other shows. He is a regular on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show and To The Point and has contributed commentary to NPR, BBC Radio, and CBC Radio. He often appears on Sky News (of England). He has been a guest on scores of call-in radio programs. He has spoken, lectured or debated at many colleges and universities, including Harvard, Cornell, Notre Dame, Yale, Amherst, University of Southern California, American University, and Arkansas State University.
Corn is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University.
Contact
David Corn may be contacted at dcorn@cq.com.