The Reporter (magazine)
| Former editors | Max Ascoli |
|---|---|
| Categories | News magazine |
| Frequency | Biweekly |
| First issue | 1949 |
| Final issue | 1968 |
| Country | United States |
| Based in | New York City |
| Language | English |
The Reporter was an American biweekly news magazine published in New York City from 1949 through 1968.
The magazine was founded by Max Ascoli, who was born in 1898 in Ferrara, Italy to a Jewish family. Ascoli grew up to become a professor in political philosophy and law, and began to draw the attention of authorities for his outspoken anti-fascist views. He was arrested in 1928, and immigrated to the United States three years later.
Throughout the 1930s and 40s, Ascoli became a prominent American anti-fascist, cultivating relationships with influential intellectuals and government officials. With the beginning of the Cold War, Ascoli became convinced of the need to counter Soviet propaganda and convince Americans of the importance of their assuming a leadership role in the world. To accomplish those ends, he joined with journalist James Reston to found The Reporter in 1949. Ascoli described the liberalism of The Reporter as one that favored liberty not in the purely negative sense, but as “always identified with and related to specific and present situations.” Writing in 1955, he described the two main tasks of American liberalism as seeking to move the country beyond demagoguery and making the case for American democracy and capitalism to the rest of the world. According to one scholar, “The Reporter was explicitly created to serve as a platform for those anticommunists who were neither former communists nor former fellow travelers.”
From the beginning, The Reporter acknowledged its activist agenda, taking a hawkish position on the Cold War. Denouncing historical isolationism, one unsigned 1949 article argued that the US was faced with “compulsion to play a leading role in the world—not to play it intermittently, by casual interventions and the enunciation of moral principles, but to play it consistently and for the greatest stakes…” Always stressing the interconnection between domestic and international issues, the magazine denounced McCarthyism and racial segregation not only on the grounds that such illiberal policies were contrary to American ideals, but by arguing that they hurt the United States in the global war of ideas.
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