Walter Pincus

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Walter Haskell Pincus
Born (1932-12-24) December 24, 1932 (age 91)
Brooklyn, New York City, U.S.
OccupationJournalist
Alma materYale University
SubjectNational security

Walter Haskell Pincus (born December 24, 1932) is an American national security journalist. He reported for The Washington Post until the end of 2015.[1] He has won several prizes including a Polk Award in 1977, a television Emmy in 1981, and shared a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with five other Washington Post reporters, and the 2010 Arthur Ross Media Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy. Since 2003, he has taught at Stanford University's Stanford in Washington program.[2]

Early life and education

Pincus was born in

Jewish parents Jonas Pincus and Clare Glassman. He attended South Side High School in Rockville Centre, New York
.

Pincus attended Yale University, where he graduated with a B.A. in 1954.[citation needed] In 2001, Pincus graduated from Georgetown University Law Center, where he obtained a J.D. degree.

Career

He served in the Counterintelligence Corps in Washington, D.C. from 1955–1957, and worked as a copy-boy for The New York Times.[3]

Pincus served in the

Senate Foreign Relations Committee under J. William Fulbright. The investigations into foreign government lobbying led to a revision of the Foreign Agents Registration Act
.

In 1963, he joined the

McGovern-Hatfield amendment to end the Vietnam War.[3]

In 1973, Pincus tried to establish a newspaper, aiming at university towns with bad local newspapers, but without success.[4] Believing that he would later buy the magazine,[5] he had become executive editor of The New Republic in 1972, where he covered the Watergate Senate hearings, the House impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon and the Watergate trial.

In 1975, after he was fired from the New Republic,[6] he went to work as consultant to NBC News and later CBS News, developing, writing or producing television segments for network evening news, magazine shows and hour documentaries, and joined The Washington Post the same year.[3]

The Washington Post

At The Washington Post, Pincus reports on

intelligence community and its problems arising out of the case of confessed spy Aldrich Ames, allegations of Chinese espionage at the nuclear weapons laboratories.[3]

Pincus attended

Georgetown Law School part-time beginning in 1995 and graduated in 2001, at the age of sixty-eight.[8] He has been a visiting lecturer at Yale University. Since 2002, he has taught a seminar at Stanford University's Stanford-in-Washington program.[citation needed
]

Plame affair

Main article: Plame affair

In October 2003, Pincus cowrote a story for The Washington Post which described a July 12, 2003 conversation between an unnamed administration official and an unnamed Washington Post reporter. The official told the reporter that Iraq war critic Joe Wilson's wife Valerie Plame worked for the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) nonproliferation division, and suggested that Plame had recommended her husband to investigate reports that Iraq's government had tried to buy uranium in Niger.

It later became clear that Pincus himself was the Post reporter in question. Special Counsel

Frontline's "News War".[6]

Author

In 2021, Pincus published Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders, a book about the effects of United States nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands.

Criticism

In July 2013, Pincus wrote an article about

whistleblower Edward Snowden[11] prompting Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald
(himself a subject of the article) to write an open letter to Pincus regarding what he described as "blatant, easily demonstrated falsehoods" including:

1) Pincus stated that I wrote an article about

program from 8 years earlier, not the FISA court order under Obama I reported); 3) Pincus strongly implied that Snowden had worked for the NSA for less than 3 months by the time he showed up in Hong Kong
with thousands of documents when, in fact, he had worked at the NSA continuously for 4 years." [12]

Greenwald and others stated that Pincus also failed to follow standard journalistic best practice in not approaching him for comment or to fact-check his allegations which led his own colleague at the Washington Post to speculate that "Pincus was sticking up for his killer sources in the national security community" - something Pincus denied despite his widely known ties to and background in the military and intelligence communities. [13]

When unionized Washington Post reporters in The Newspaper Guild withheld bylines to protest a company contract offer, Pincus refused to join his fellow reporters and allowed his byline to be published.[14]

Honors and awards

Pincus has won several newspaper prizes including the 1961 Page One award for magazine reporting in The Reporter, the George Polk Award in 1977 for stories in The Washington Post exposing the neutron warhead, a television Emmy for writing on the 1981 CBS News documentary series, "Defense of the United States", and in 1999 he was awarded the first Stewart Alsop Award given by the Association of Foreign Intelligence Officers for his coverage of national security affairs. In 2002 he was one of six Washington Post reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting,[15] and in 2010 the Arthur Ross Media Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy.[16]

Personal life

In September 1954, Pincus married Betty Meskin, with whom he has a son. In May 1965, he married his second wife Ann Witsell Terry from Little Rock, Arkansas, with whom he has one daughter and two sons.[citation needed]

See also

References

  1. ^ Pincus, Walter (29 December 2015). "A farewell to The Washington Post". The Washington Post. Retrieved 30 December 2015.
  2. ^ "Walter Pincus". American Academy in Berlin.
  3. ^ a b c d "Walter Pincus". Nieman Watchdog. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
  4. ^ Seibel, Andrea (March 7, 2009). "Der Online-Journalismus wird überschätzt". Die Welt (in German). Retrieved October 27, 2011.
  5. ^ Sherrill, Robert (March–April 1976). "The new regime at The New Republic". Columbia Journalism Review. Vol. 14, no. 6. p. 23. Archived from the original on 2012-04-06.
  6. ^ a b "Interview Walter Pincus". Frontline. July 14, 2006. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
  7. ^ "Walter Pincus". The Washington Post. September 14, 2012.
  8. ^ "Georgetown Law Establishes Degree Program for Journalists". Georgetown University. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
  9. ^ "Profile: Walter Pincus". History Commons. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
  10. ^ Sniffen, Michael J. (February 12, 2007). "Journalists Name Additional Leak Sources". Associated Press.
  11. ^ Pincus, Walter (July 8, 2013). "Questions for Snowdown". The Washington Post. Washington Post.
  12. ^ Greenwald, Glenn (July 10, 2013). "The journalistic practices of the Washington Post and Walter Pincus". London. The Guardian.
  13. ^ Wemple, Erik (July 10, 2013). "Pincus responds to Greenwald blast". The Washington Post. Washington Post.
  14. ^ "The Protest that knows no name". College Park, MD. American Journalism Review.
  15. ^ "The 2002 Pulitzer Prize Winners: National Reporting (Citation)". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2008-09-10.
  16. ^ "Arthur Ross Award for Distinguished Reporting & Analysis on Foreign Affairs". The American Academy of Diplomacy. Retrieved October 27, 2011.

External links

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