We are pleased and proud to host Ken Silverstein this Thursday, May 25, 6:30-9 (while the evening will go 6:30-9, Mr. Silverstein will be speaking from 7:30-8:15, and will need to leave promptly).
Mr. Silverstein is the Washington editor for Harper’s magazine. His bio, from the Harper’s website:
Ken Silverstein is the Washington Editor for Harper’s Magazine, and a regular contributor to both the print and web version of Harper’s. A former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Silverstein has covered such topics as intelligence collaboration between the CIA and controversial foreign governments in Sudan and Libya, political corruption in Washington, and links between American oil companies and repressive foreign governments. His 2004 series “The Politics of Petroleum,” co-written with T. Christian Miller, won an Overseas Press Club Award. His stories on ties between the government of Equatorial Guinea and major U.S. companies—including Riggs Bank, ExxonMobil and Marathon Oil—led to the convening of a federal grand jury, and to investigations by the Senate and the Securities and Exchange Commission. His report, co-written with Chuck Neubauer, on a lobbying business opened by Karen Weldon, daughter of Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, led to the opening of an investigation by the House Ethics Committee.
Silverstein has been an outspoken gadfly in the newspaper business. In December of 2005, a memo he wrote to his editors at the Los Angeles Times expressing his dismay over their insistence on false “balance” was discussed in an article by Michael Massing in The New York Review of Books. While reporting on potential voter fraud in St. Louis in 2004, Silverstein was angered to learn that his findings were to be woven into a larger “balanced” piece on accusations being made nationwide, when it was clear that Republican charges of irregularities in St. Louis were insubstantial. “I am completely exasperated by this approach to the news,” Silverstein wrote. “The idea seems to be that we go out to report but when it comes time to write we turn off our brains and repeat the spin from both sides.”
Mr. Silverstein is also noted for starting the newsletter Counterpunch.
For any nonregulars stumbling across this post, the event is in the back room at Timberlake’s, 1726 Connecticut Ave NW, a couple of blocks north of the Dupont Circle Metro.
—Keith • 11:02 am, May 24