The Reporter (magazine)

The Reporter (magazine)

The Reporter was an American biweekly news magazine published in New York 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.

The Reporter had a huge influence in its day, both among policy makers and the educated public. One author, writing in Commentary in 1960, praised The Reporter as “represent the concerns of intelligent American liberalism.” In a 1962 survey of reporters asking what magazines they cited in their work, The Reporter came in fourth place after Time, U.S. News & World Report, and Newsweek, with no other publication coming close. It would eventually achieve a circulation of 215,000 readers. Despite its internationalist orientation and the promotion of the magazine by U.S. government agencies working abroad, however, The Reporter had relatively few European readers. Contributors included some of the most prominent statesmen, journalists, and intellectuals of the day. The Reporter ceased publication in 1968 due to the widening gap between Ascoli’s hawkish stance on the Vietnam War on the one hand, and the opinions of readers and advertisers on the other. Ascoli pointed to an “increasingly heavy editorial and financial burden” behind his decision to merge his publication with Harper’s Magazine.