Jackson Diehl

Jackson Diehl (born 1956) is the Deputy Editorial Page Editor of The Washington Post. He writes many of the paper's editorials on foreign affairs, helps to oversee the editorial and oped pages and authors a regular column.

Early Life and education

Diehl was born in 1956 in San Antonio, Texas. He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1978.

Career

Diehl joined the Washington Post as a reporter in 1978. From 1982 to 1992, he worked at the paper's foreign bureaus in Buenos Aires, Warsaw and Jerusalem.

He was Foreign Editor and Assistant Managing Editor for Foreign news from 1992 to 1999, and oversaw the expansion of the Washington Post's foreign staff. In 1999, he became Assistant Managing Editor for National news and oversaw coverage of the 2000 presidential election campaign.^[1]

Editorial influence and positions as columnist

As an editor and columnist, Diehl advocated the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the Post's early tenor of approval for the war has been attributed to his influence.^[2] Diehl has advocated democratic reforms and a tougher U.S. policy toward Egypt and other autocracies^[3] and has criticized Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution.^[4]

Awards and commendations

Jackson Diehl received Inter-American Press Association Award for Interpretive Journalism in 1984 for his coverage of South America, and the Bob Considine Award of the Overseas Press Association in 1990 for his coverage of the 1989 revolution in Eastern Europe.^[1] He was named a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for his commentary on Egypt, and was again a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013 for editorials about Syria. In 2014 he was presented with the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit by the government of Poland for "outstanding contribution to the support of democratic changes in Poland." ^[5]

References