Michael Gartner

Michael Gartner is an author, journalist, lawyer, businessman, and third generation newspaperman. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorials about community issues that he wrote for the Daily Tribune, Ames Iowa.

Over his long career in journalism Gartner has served a variety of roles in the news media field:

Wall Street Journal-Copy Editor and Page One Editor, 1960-1974
Des Moines Register- Executive Editor and President, 1974-1985
Gannett Company and the USA Today -General News Executive, 1985-1986
Louisville Courier-Journal and Times- Editor, 1986-1987
NBC News- President, 1988-1993
American Society of Newspaper Editors - President, 1988-1993
The Daily Tribune, Ames, Iowa- Chairman, Editor, 1993-1999
Big Green Umbrella Media, (formerly Greater Des Moines Publishing Co); publisher of Cityview, an alternative weekly newspaper in Des Moines, Iowa), co-owner, 2003-present

Gartner was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1938. He received his BA. from Carleton College and J.D. from the New York University School of Law. He served as a Fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He holds honorary degrees from Simpson College, Drake University, Grandview College, Iowa Wesleyan University and James Madison University in Virginia.

Articles by this Author

Fair Comment, October/November 1982 | Vol. 33, No. 6

Americans don’t hesitate to say anything they please about a public performance. But the right to do so wasn’t established until the Cherry Sisters sued a critic who didn’t like their appalling vaudeville act.

“The First Rough Draft Of History”, October/November 1982 | Vol. 33, No. 6

… is today’s newspaper. Here the executive editor of the Washington ‘Post’ takes us on a spirited dash through the minefields that await reporters and editors who gather and disseminate a most valuable commodity.

Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.