Journalism
Hitchens worked for the Daily Express between 1977 and 2000, initially as a reporter specialising in education and industrial and labour affairs, then as a political reporter, and subsequently as Deputy Political Editor. Leaving parliamentary journalism to cover defence and diplomatic affairs, he reported on the decline and collapse of communist regimes in several Warsaw Pact countries, which culminated in a stint as Moscow Correspondent and reporting on the final months of the Soviet Union in 1990/91. He then became the Daily Express Washington correspondent. Returning to London in 1995, he became a commentator and columnist. Hitchens continued to espouse a conservative viewpoint, despite the publication's move towards the political centre in the mid-90s and its decision before the 1997 general election to support the Labour Party under Tony Blair. In 2000, Hitchens left the Daily Express after its acquisition by Richard Desmond; Hitchens stated that working for Desmond would have represented a moral conflict of interest. Hitchens joined The Mail on Sunday, where he has a weekly column and weblog in which he debates directly with readers. Hitchens has also written for The Spectator and The American Conservative magazines, and occasionally for more left-leaning publications such as The Guardian, Prospect, and the New Statesman.
After being shortlisted in 2007 and 2009, Hitchens won the Orwell Prize in political journalism in 2010. Peter Keller, one of the Orwell Prize judges, described Hitchens's writing as being "as firm, polished and potentially lethal as a Guardsman’s boot."
Read more about this topic: Peter Hitchens
Famous quotes containing the word journalism:
“In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.”
—Harold Evans (b. 1928)
“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)