Peter Osnos

Peter Osnos is a journalist turned book editor/publisher. He spent 18 years working at various bureaus for The Washington Post before founding Public Affairs Books. More

Peter Osnos is founder and editor at large of PublicAffairs books and a media fellow at The Century Foundation which distributes this weekly "Platform" column. (An archive of the columns is available at www.tcf.org.) He is vice-chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review and executive director of The Caravan Project, which is also based at The Century Foundation.

Osnos spent 18 years at the Washington Post, where he was variously Indochina bureau chief, Moscow correspondent, foreign editor, national editor and London bureau chief.

He was publisher of Random House's Times Books Division from 1991 to 1996, and was also vice president and associate publisher of the Random House imprint. Authors he has worked with include President Bill Clinton, former President Jimmy Carter, Rosalyn Carter, Nancy Reagan, former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, Barack Obama, Boris Yeltsin, Paul Volcker, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Clark Clifford, Sam Donaldson, Morley Safer, Peggy Noonan, Molly Ivins, Stanley Karnow, Jim Lehrer, Muhammad Yunus, Scott McClellan, Robert McNamara, Natan Sharansky, and journalists from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Atlantic and the Economist.

He served as chair of the Trade Division of the Association of American Publishers Committee, and is an emeritus member of the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch. He serves on the board of other journalism and human rights organizations and is a member of The Council on Foreign Relations.

Mad Men at Risk

The superb multi-season television dramas of the past decade--The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men, now in its third year on AMC--are triumphs of a cinematic genre, featuring plots, characters, and settings that are terrific, with enough edge to bring sophisticated viewers back week after week. Next Sunday, Mad Men is up for sixteen Emmys. Last year it won for best drama. Okay, so much for encomiums. More »

What Would Liebling Say Today?

A. J. Liebling was the principal writer of the New Yorker's "Wayward Press" column from 1945 until his death in 1963. These columns were widely regarded as the ne plus ultra of journalism about journalism because of their combination of reporting, insight, and wit. Liebling's appraisals could be scathing, but always derived from his respect for what could be, but rarely were, the standards of the trade he practiced. Delving lately into a collection of Liebling's… More »

Do You Subscribe to Fox News?

At every opportunity this summer, I would ask people, random strangers to close friends, whether they subscribed to Fox News. In the circles I tend to travel, the answer was some form of dismissive, "Are you kidding?" Well, actually, I was not. By the most recent estimate I found, 80 percent of Americans have either cable or satellite television service, which means that all of them are subscribers to Fox News, AMC (Mad Men), Lifetime (Project Runway), and … More »

Don Hewitt's Secrets

The deaths of Don Hewitt, producer extraordinaire, and earlier this summer of Walter Cronkite highlight from both sides of the camera the passing of broadcasters who epitomized the best in television news: great storytelling that combined journalism with showmanship of the sort that television, from its earliest days, has always demanded. It is striking and sad that both men in their later years talked openly of their disappointment with how news on the airwaves… More »

Robert S. McNamara: In Memoriam

The family of Robert S. McNamara sent out cards recently to those who offered condolences after he died last month. In accordance with his wishes, said the card, "there will be no funeral or memorial service and his ashes will be placed in Snowmass, Colorado and Martha's Vineyard." I can hear McNamara's gravelly voice and picture him waving his hand to lend emphasis to his determination not to be extolled--or denounced by a protestor--at a posthumous event. In… More »

Books: The Next Chapter

Four summers ago, pondering a way to define how publishers could take advantage of emerging technologies for delivering information in a variety of formats, I came up with this slogan: Good Books. Any Way You Want Them. Now. The point was that books, basically unchanged in centuries as handheld objects composed of printed pages and covers, needed to adapt to the growing importance of screens, mobile devices, earphones, and the sense among readers that they should… More »

Remembering a Remarkable Jewish Mother

A documentary feature making the art house rounds this summer with the jolly title of Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg is a fascinating and revealing look at the story of Gertrude Berg. She was the star, writer, and producer of an enormously popular radio and television series in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, which was also a movie and Broadway play. In retrospect, this warm-hearted portrayal of a New York Jewish family without reference to anti-Semitism, ethnic insecurity, or… More »

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