James Ridgeway

James Fowler Ridgeway (November 1, 1936February 13, 2021) was an American investigative journalist. In a career spanning six decades, he covered many topics including automobile industry safety, American universities, far-right movements including the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazism, and campaigns against solitary confinement. He was the Washington correspondent for ''The Village Voice'' for over 30 years between the mid-1970s to mid-2000s, and had also worked for ''The New Republic, and Mother Jones.'' He had also contributed to magazines and newspapers including ''The New York Times'', ''The New York Review of Books'', ''The Wall Street Journal'', and ''The Economist'' among others.

Early life

Ridgeway was born on November 1, 1936, in Auburn, New York, to Florence (née Fowler) and George Ridgeway. His father was a professor and historian at Wells College, in Aurora, New York. His father had served as a British affairs specialist for the State Department during World War II. Ridgeway studied in schools in Washington, D.C. and Garrison, New York, before graduating from Hackley School, a private school in Tarrytown, New York, in 1955. He went on to graduate with a degree in English in 1959 from Princeton University. During his time at the university, he was an editor of ''The Daily Princetonian'', the university's student newspaper.

Career

Ridgeway started his career with ''The Wall Street Journal'', where he covered banking and the economy. He later went to Europe, where he wrote for ''The Economist'', ''The Guardian'', and ''The Observer'', as a freelancer. He returned to the United States in 1962, and moved to Washington, D.C., where he covered economics and industry for ''The New Republic'' for eight years. Along with his collaborator, Andrew Kopkind, he founded ''Mayday'' in 1968, which was later renamed as ''Hard Times''. The newspaper covered popular movements of the time including the Vietnam war protests, Black Power movement, and students protest movements. He also went on to be an editor for the New Left magazine, '' Ramparts'', between 1970 and 1975.

Ridgeway became nationally known when he revealed in ''The New Republic'' that General Motors had hired private detectives to tail consumer advocate Ralph Nader in an attempt to dig up information that might discredit him (Nader was behind litigation which challenged the safety of the Chevrolet Corvair). Ridgeway's revelations of the company's snooping and dirty tricks prompted a Senate subcommittee led by Senator Abraham Ribicoff to summon James Roche, president of GM, to explain his company's harassment — and apologize. The incident catapulted auto safety into the public spotlight and helped send Nader's book, ''Unsafe at Any Speed'' (1965), to the top of the bestseller lists.

He served as Washington correspondent for ''The Village Voice'' where he worked for 30 years, from the mid-1970s until 2006. He covered politics and foreign affairs including Europe, the Middle East, and the Balkans. On April 13, 2006's ''Democracy Now!'' broadcast, Ridgeway told host Amy Goodman that Michael Lacey, the executive editor of the ''Voice'', "killed my column, and he asked me to submit ideas for articles to him one by one, which I did, and which he either ignored or turned down, except in one case ... they won't say that I'm fired. I'm supposedly laid off." However, in 2012, he would write about his time at the ''Voice'', talking about the independence while he was at the newspaper, "Nobody censored what we wrote. Nobody messed with how things were written, or dreamed of questioning a political opinion."

Following his departure from the ''Voice'', Ridgeway was hired by ''Mother Jones'' to run its Washington, DC bureau. He continued working for the magazine until 2012. His topics included the demise of the social safety net, the racist far right's response to the election of Barack Obama, and the case of the Angola 3, three Black men held in solitary confinement for decades in Louisiana.

In 2008, he covered the Democratic primary elections, filmed interviewing Mike Gravel in New Hampshire, in which Gravel is interviewed on the phone by Neal Conan for NPR's, ''Talk of the Nation''.

In 2009, together with longtime editor and collaborator Jean Casella, Ridgeway founded Solitary Watch, a nonprofit watchdog project that exposes the widespread use of solitary confinement and other abusive conditions in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention facilities. Solitary Watch was the first media project devoted to the topic, and helped bring the largely hidden practice to the attention of the public and larger media outlets. He received a 2012 Soros Justice Media Fellowship, a 2013 Media for a Just Society Award, and a 2014 Alicia Patterson Fellowship for his reporting on prisons. In 2016, the ''New Yorkers Jennifer Gonnerman wrote a piece titled "James Ridgeway's Solitary Reporting", about his work at Solitary Watch and the extensive correspondence he maintained with people held in solitary confinement. He was also extensively interviewed for ''An Unreasonable Man'', a 2007 documentary about Ralph Nader.

In a career spanning six decades, he covered many topics including automobile safety, far-right activities including the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazism, and campaigns against solitary confinement. His articles have appeared in ''The New York Times'', ''The New York Review of Books'', ''Parade'', '' Harper's'', ''The Nation'', ''Dollars & Sense'', ''The Economist'', ''The New York Times Magazine'', ''The Wall Street Journal'' and other magazines and newspapers.

Personal life

Ridgeway married Patricia Carol Dodge, an editor with ''The New Republic'', in 1966. The couple went on to have a son. Ridgeway died on February 13, 2021, in Washington, D.C., at the age of 84.

Works

Ridgeway was the author and editor of twenty books on domestic and foreign affairs, including ''The Closed Corporation: American Universities in Crisis''; ''The Politics of Ecology''; and, more recently, ''The 5 Unanswered Questions About 9/11: What the 9/11 Commission Report Failed to Tell Us''; ''The Haiti Files: Decoding the Crisis''; ''Yugoslavia's Ethnic Nightmare'' (a collection co-edited with Jasminka Udovicki); ''A Pocket Guide to Environmental Bad Guys'' (with Jeffrey St. Clair); and ''Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, the Rise of a New White Culture''. He wrote the text for ''Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry,'' with photographs by Sylvia Plachy. Together with Jean Casella and Sarah Shourd, he also co-edited the first anthology of writing from solitary confinement, '' Hell Is a Very Small Place'', published in 2016. Ridgeway co-directed the companion film '' Blood in the Face'', as well as ''Feed'', a documentary on the 1992 presidential campaign.

A revised edition of his book ''Blood in the Face'' covering the events from 2010s is planned to launch in mid-2021.

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References

External links

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"Sweet Subpoena: Nine Investigations That Could Spice Up the Next Congress"''Mother Jones''
September/October 2006.

Ridgewayng.com: Original reporting
News video collaborations between Ridgeway and Alicia Ng. Retrieved April 13, 2006.
eText of ''Politics of Ecology'''VV' Staff Protests Ridgeway's Firing; Management Doesn't Care''Village Voice Shakeup: Top Investigative Journalist Fired, Prize-Winning Writers Resign Following Merger with New Times Media''
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MP3
Watch in 128K . Rea
Transcript
Host Amy Goodman interviews current and former staff James Ridgeway, Nat Hentoff, Tom Robbins, Sydney Schanberg and two reporters Mark Jacobson and Tim Redmond.
James Ridgeway
at ''The Guardian''
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Ridgeway, James
1936 births
2021 deaths
20th-century American journalists
21st-century American journalists
American male journalists
Hackley School alumni
Journalists from New York (state)
Journalists from Washington, D.C.
People from Auburn, New York
Princeton University alumni
The Village Voice people
The New Republic people
The Wall Street Journal people
Writers from New York (state)