David Corn Profile
David Corn is a veteran Washington journalist and political commentator. He is the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones magazine and an analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. He won the 2012 George Polk award and a National Magazine award for breaking the 47-percent video story that influenced the Obama-Romney presidential contest. For 20 years, he was the Washington editor of The Nation magazine.
Corn writes on a host of subjects, including politics, the White House, Congress, and national security. He has broken stories on Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Colin Powell, Rush Limbaugh, Enron, the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA leak case, corruption in Iraq, the National Rifle Association, the Pentagon, and assorted Washington players and institutions.
Corn has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, Newsday, Harper's, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, the LA Weekly, the Village Voice, The Independent, Elle, Slate, Salon, and other publications and websites. He has blogged for AOL.com's Politics Daily, HuffingtonPost.com, CQPolitics.com, and the The Guardian. For years he wrote the on-line column, "Capital Games" for TheNation.com.
He is the author of three New York Times best-sellers- -- Showdown: The Inside Story of How Barack Obama Fought Back Against Boehner, Cantor, and the Tea Party; Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (with Michael Isikoff); and The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception -- and the e-book, 47 Percent: Uncovering the Romney Video that Rocked the 2012 Election. His novel, Deep Background, was hailed as one of the best novels of the year by the Los Angeles Times. Corn is also the author of the biography Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades.
MSNBC host Chris Matthews said Showdown "is a great book—the real inside so try. If you want to understand the Obama White House and how Washington works, you have to read it." The Huffington Post called Showdown "a dramatic behind-the-scenes account of the decision making that occurred within the Obama White House following the disastrous-for-Democrats 2010 mid-term elections." The New York Times praised Hubris as "fascinating reading" and the most "comprehensive account" of the Bush administration's misleading sales campaign for the war. The Washington Post hailed Hubris as a book of "shocking clarity" and compared it favorably to Barbara Tuchman's classic March of Folly. Tom Brokaw of NBC News said, "Hubris is a bold and provocative book that will quickly become an explosive part of the national debate on how we got involved in Iraq." The Washington Post called The Lies of George W. Bush "a serious case... [that] ought to be in voters' minds when they cast their ballots. A painstaking indictment."
The Washington Monthly called Blond Ghost "an amazing compendium of CIA fact and lore." The Washington Post noted that this biography "deserves a space on that small shelf of worthwhile books about the agency." The New York Times termed it "a scorchingly critical account of an enigmatic figure who for two decades ran some of the agency's most important, and most controversial, covert operations." The Washington Post said Deep Background is "brimming with gusto... As clean and steely as an icy Pinot Grigio... [An] exceptional thriller." The Los Angeles Times called it "a slaughterhouse scorcher of a book you don't want to put down." The New York Times said, "You can either read now or wait to see the movie." PBS anchor Jim Lehrer observed that Deep Background is "a Washington novel with everything. It's a page-turning thriller from first word to last... that brings some of the worst parts of Washington vividly alive."
Corn contributed "My Murder," a short story, to Unusual Suspects, an anthology of mystery and crime fiction. The story was nominated for a 1997 Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America and republished in The Year's 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories.
Corn has long been a prominent analyst on television and radio. He regularly appears on Hardball, The Rachel Maddow Show and other MSNBC shows. For years, he was a Fox News contributor, appearing on The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes, and On the Record with Greta Van Susteren. He was a regular panelist on weekly television show, Eye On Washington, which was syndicated on PBS stations across the United States. He was a guest host for CNN's Crossfire and a regular panelist on its Capital Gang. He has appeared on CBS News' Face the Nation, ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopoulos, PBS's Newshour and Washington Week in Review, the CBS Evening News, Fox News Sunday, CNN's Reliable Sources, The McLaughlin Group, C-SPAN's Washington Journal, and many other shows. He is a regular guest on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show and To The Point and has contributed commentary to NPR, BBC Radio, and CBC Radio. He has been a guest on scores of call-in radio programs.
His twitter feed--@DavidCornDC--has 170,000 followers.
Corn has spoken, lectured or debated at many colleges and events, including Harvard, Brown, Cornell, Notre Dame, Yale, Amherst, University of Southern California, American University, University of Vermont, Arkansas State University, the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Boulder, and the Chicago Humanities Festival.
He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University.