Mark Thompson (reporter)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mark Thompson, has been a reporter in Washington since 1979, and has played a key role in Time magazine's coverage of national security issues since joining the magazine in 1994.
He has co-written the magazine's cover stories on United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, as well as a cover raising questions on the United States Army's personnel woes and the possibility of reinstituting the draft. He was responsible for explaining the war, its strategic underpinnings, and its aftermath, to Time's 4 million subscribers. He has hopscotched by helicopter across Afghanistan and Iraq, reporting on the wars' progress and U.S. military's surprising lack of armor. He wrote three early and major pieces on the true costs of the Iraq war -- the first major look at the war's wounded, a study of the U.S. troops killed in a single week, and the lonely vigil of the Ohio family whose son remains the sole American missing in action.
Thompson also has tooled scoured the skies near northern Iraq with the United States Air Force, rolled into Kosovo with the United States Marines and secured the sole interview granted by the first woman to command a U.S. warship, while billeted aboard her vessel in the Pacific. He has taken an F-16 jet fighter for a spin above the Gulf of Mexico and detailed the Air Force's troubled T-3 trainers, scrapped in the wake of Time's story. He reported on the "softening" of boot camp and the rash of domestic violence in military families. He has witnessed U.S. troops at war and work around the world.
Thompson came to Time after covering the military for the late Knight Ridder Newspapers (including the Detroit Free Press, the Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the San Jose Mercury-News) for eight years. He served on the Pentagon's first operational press pool in the Persian Gulf in 1987. Prior to joining Knight-Ridder in 1986, Thompson reported from Washington for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for seven years. While at the Star-Telegram, his newspaper and he won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for his series of articles on a design flaw aboard Fort Worth-built Bell Huey and Cobra helicopters. The Army and Bell had allowed the problem to fester for more than a decade,since the Vietnam War, during which it had triggered crashes killing 250 U.S. servicemen. In the wake of his reports, the Army grounded 600 helicopters for immediate repairs and ultimately ordered a more substantial fix that has eliminated such mishaps. Before coming to Washington, Thompson spent a year reporting for the Oakland Press, in Pontiac, Michigan, and three years as editor of the Rhode Island Pendulum, a weekly newspaper in his hometown of East Greenwich, Rhode Island. He is a 1975 graduate of Boston University's School of Public Communication.
