| Jane Mayer | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1955 New York City [1] |
| Occupation | journalist and author |
| Spouse(s) | William B. Hamilton |
| Children | daughter |
| Notable relatives | grandfather: Allan Nevins |
| Notable credit(s) | The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal |
Jane Mayer (born 1955[2][3] in New York City [1]) is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1995.[1] In recent years, she has written extensive articles for that publication on Dick Cheney, the bin Laden family, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the Koch family, the television series 24 and the US government's controversial policy of extraordinary rendition.
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Mayer is a 1973 graduate of Fieldston and a 1977 graduate of Yale University, where she was a campus stringer for Time magazine. She continued her studies at Oxford University.[1]
Mayer began her journalistic career in Vermont, writing for two small weekly papers, The Weathersfield Weekly and The Black River Tribune, then moving on to a daily paper, The Rutland Herald. She was a metropolitan reporter for the now-defunct Washington Star, then joined The Wall Street Journal in 1982, where she worked for 12 years, during which time she was named the newspaper's first female White House correspondent, and subsequently senior writer and front page editor.[4] She also served as a war correspondent and foreign correspondent for the Journal, where she reported on bombing of the American barracks in Beirut, the Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the last days of Communism in the former Soviet Union. She was nominated twice by the Journal for the Pulitzer Prize for feature-writing.[5]
Mayer has also contributed to the New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and the liberal American Prospect and co-authored two previous books—Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (1994)[6] (written with Jill Abramson), a study of the nomination and appointment of Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court, and Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984–1988 (1989) (written with Doyle McManus), an account of Ronald Reagan's second term in the White House. Strange Justice served as the basis for the Showtime television movie of the same name, starring Delroy Lindo, Mandy Patinkin and Regina Taylor.[7]
Of the portrait painted by co-authors Abramson and Mayer of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in Strange Justice, Time said: "Its portrait of Thomas as an id suffering in the role of a Republican superego is more detailed and convincing than anything that has appeared so far."[8] Of Landslide, New York Times Washington correspondent Steven V. Roberts, reviewing the book in The Times, said "this is clearly a reporter's book, full of rich anecdote and telling detail.... I am impressed with the amount of inside information collected here."[9]
Mayer is currently a staff writer for The New Yorker, and works from the magazine's Washington bureau. The granddaughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Allan Nevins, and great-great-granddaughter of Emanuel Lehman, a founder of the now-defunct eponymous banking house, Mayer is married to William B. Hamilton, an editor at The Washington Post.[10] They have one daughter, Kate.
Mayer's third and latest nonfiction book, The Dark Side (2008), addresses the origins, legal justifications, and possible war crimes liability, of the use of interrogation techniques to break down detainees' resistance and the subsequent deaths of detainees under such interrogation as applied by the CIA. The book was a finalist for the National Book Awards.[11] Her previous book Strange Justice was also a finalist for the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1994.[12] Both books were also finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award.[13][14]
In its review of The Dark Side, the New York Times noted that the book is "the most vivid and comprehensive account we have so far of how a government founded on checks and balances and respect for individual rights could have been turned against those ideals."[15] The Times subsequently named The Dark Side one of its notable books of the year.[16]
"Her achievement," wrote reviewer Andrew J. Bacevich in The Washington Post of Mayer's book, "lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces."[17] The volume, wrote Bacevich, a Boston University professor, "is a very fine book."
In a story the previous day, Post reporter Joby Warrick reported that Mayer's book revealed that a Central Intelligence Agency analyst warned the Bush administration that "up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake," but that the administration ignored the warning and insisted that all were enemy combatants.[18]
In a story appearing the same day in The New York Times, reporter Scott Shane revealed that Mayer's book disclosed that Red Cross officials had concluded in a secret report the previous year that "the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes."[19]
Said Mayer of her work on the book: "I see myself more as a reporter than as an advocate."[20]
Author Mayer has appeared as a guest on the Charlie Rose Show,[21] as well as on the David Letterman show on CBS.[22] She was also a guest on the Bill Moyers Journal show on PBS in 2008,[23] and appeared as a guest on PBS Tavis Smiley show on August 7, 2008, to discuss her book The Dark Side, which had just made the New York Times bestseller list.[24] She appeared as a guest on the Comedy Central's Colbert Report on August 12, 2008.
On January 26, 2009, author Mayer was interviewed at Yale Law School's Law and Media lecture series by Distinguished Journalist in Residence Linda Greenhouse and Truman Capote Fellow in Creative Writing Emily Bazelon.[25] In October 2008, Mayer participated in a panel discussion of journalists at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University devoted to the media's coverage of the Iraq War.[26] That same month Mayer participated as a panelist in a discussion of the same subject at the Newseum in Washington, D.C..[27]
Mayer was also interviewed on the C-SPAN Book-TV show by Washington Post reporter Dana Priest on the subject of The Dark Side.[28] The show aired on July 19, 2008.
Mayer has appeared on the Democracy Now! show.[29][30][31][32][33]
Mayer was a featured speaker, along with Dan Rather, Marcy Wheeler, and Victor Navasky, for a September 2009 fundraiser for The Nation magazine.[34]
Mayer was awarded the 2008 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism for her investigative reporter leading to her book The Dark Side. The Award, presented annually by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is given to reporters for "distinguished cumulative accomplishments." In presenting the award, Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Journalism school and one of the nine members of the award committee, noted that Mayer and her fellow winner, Andrew C. Revkin, science reporter for The New York Times, "set the gold standard for journalists, and we have benefitted tremendously from their dedication and hard work."[35] She has also won the Ridenhour Book Prize[36] and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.[37][38]
Mayer was a finalist in the National Magazine Awards for 2007 for her nonfiction piece in The New Yorker entitled The Black Sites,[39] which was subsequently collected in The Best American Magazine Writing 2008, published by Columbia University Press and edited by Jacob Weisberg, then editor-in-chief of Slate.[40]
In 2008, Mayer was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in connection with her ongoing work on her third book, The Dark Side.[41][42] In 2009 Mayer was awarded the Hillman Prize and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for The Dark Side.[43][44]