Christopher Ruddy - Background

Background

Ruddy grew up on Long Island, New York, where his father was a police officer in Nassau County. He graduated from Chaminade High School in Mineola, NY before graduating summa cum laude with a degree in history from the Roman Catholic, St. John's University in Queens, NY in 1987. He then earned a master's degree in public policy from the London School of Economics and also studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He worked briefly as a high school social studies teacher in the Bronx, New York City.

Early in his career, Ruddy was editor-in-chief of a conservative monthly periodical known as the New York Guardian. While with the Guardian, Ruddy gained notice for debunking a story in the PBS documentary Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II that an all-black army unit had liberated the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. He called the documentary an example of "how the media can manipulate facts and narratives to create a revised history both believable and untrue". PBS subsequently withdrew its support for the documentary, following an independent investigation by the American Jewish Committee. Ruddy then moved into more mainstream journalism with the New York Post, which he joined as an investigative reporter late in the summer of 1993. After initially writing about abuse of Social Security disability benefits, he focused on the Vincent Foster case, the subject of an ongoing investigation after Foster had died earlier that year.

Since 1996, Ruddy has been Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. Ruddy serves on the Board of Directors of the Financial Publishers Association, an industry trade group representing the nation's financial media. Ruddy also served as a representative on the U.S. delegation headed by Senators Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham to the NATO 44th Munich Security Conference.

In 2009, Ruddy was elected to the board of directors of the American Swiss Foundation, a non-profit organization that fosters relations between the two countries. The group represents Switzerland's leading banks, insurance and multinational corporations.

In January 2010, Britain's Telegraph ranked Ruddy as one of the "100 Most Influential Conservatives" in the U.S. The paper said: "Chris Ruddy is an increasingly powerful and influential player in the conservative media and beyond."

Ruddy has been a "Sustaining Donor" to the Wikimedia Foundation.