Continuing the legacy of Charlie Peters
At the Washington Monthly, we continue to celebrate the life and legacy of our founding editor Charlie Peters by sharing remembrances from the writers whose careers he helped launch.
Gregg Easterbrook, the longtime author who now publishes the "All Predictions Wrong" newsletter, recalls the high standards Charlie set:
Before Peters, literary nonfiction was too ivory-tower. Charlie insisted that every article enfold The Big Three—reporting, thinking, and writing. Serious nonfiction had been open to reporting during the time of Ida Tarbell and Elizabeth Cochran (“Nellie Bly”), but by the postwar period, doing legwork and interviews were looked down on.
Charlie was insistent his writers get out of Washington D.C., see things for themselves and interview the midlevel government and business officials who knew what was really going on. It was a formula for scoop after scoop—both news scoops and intellectual breakthroughs.
Steven Waldman, now chair of the Rebuild Local News Coalition, writes about how Charlie refused to let writers constrain themselves with bias:
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.
Waldman also urges readers to keep Charlie's legacy going with a donation to the Washington Monthly.
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.
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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.
If you agree, there is something you can do to help: pitch in with a donation to the Washington Monthly.
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Best,
Bill Scher
Politics Editor, Washington Monthly