James Fowler Ridgeway (November 1, 1936February 13, 2021) was an American investigative journalist. In a career spanning six decades, he covered many topics including automobile industry safety, American universities, far-right movements including the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazism, and campaigns against solitary confinement. He was the Washington correspondent for The Village Voice for over 30 years between the mid-1970s to mid-2000s, and had also worked for The New Republic, and Mother Jones. He had also contributed to magazines and newspapers including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist among others.
Early life
Ridgeway was born on November 1, 1936, in Auburn, New York, to Florence (née Fowler) and George Ridgeway. His father was a professor and historian at Wells College, in Aurora, New York. His father had served as a British affairs specialist for the State Department during World War II. Ridgeway studied in schools in Washington, D.C. and Garrison, New York, before graduating from Hackley School, a private school in Tarrytown, New York, in 1955. He went on to graduate with a degree in English in 1959 from Princeton University. During his time at the university, he was an editor of The Daily Princetonian, the university's student newspaper.
Career
Ridgeway started his career with The Wall Street Journal, where he covered banking and the economy. He later went to Europe, where he wrote for The Economist, The Guardian, and The Observer, as a freelancer. He returned to the United States in 1962, and moved to Washington, D.C., where he covered economics and industry for The New Republic for eight years. Along with his collaborator, Andrew Kopkind, he founded Mayday in 1968, which was later renamed as Hard Times. The newspaper covered popular movements of the time including the Vietnam war protests, Black Power movement, and students protest movements. He also went on to be an editor for the New Left magazine, Ramparts, between 1970 and 1975.
Ridgeway became nationally known when he revealed in The New Republic that General Motors had hired private detectives to tail consumer advocate Ralph Nader in an attempt to dig up information that might discredit him (Nader was behind litigation which challenged the safety of the Chevrolet Corvair). Ridgeway's revelations of the company's snooping and dirty tricks prompted a Senate subcommittee led by Senator Abraham Ribicoff to summon James Roche, president of GM, to explain his company's harassment — and apologize. The incident catapulted auto safety into the public spotlight and helped send Nader's book, Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), to the top of the bestseller lists.
He served as Washington correspondent for The Village Voice where he worked for 30 years, from the mid-1970s until 2006. He covered politics and foreign affairs including Europe, the Middle East, and the Balkans. On April 13, 2006's Democracy Now! broadcast, Ridgeway told host Amy Goodman that Michael Lacey, the executive editor of the Voice, "killed my column, and he asked me to submit ideas for articles to him one by one, which I did, and which he either ignored or turned down, except in one case ... they won't say that I'm fired. I'm supposedly laid off." However, in 2012, he would write about his time at the Voice, talking about the independence while he was at the newspaper, "Nobody censored what we wrote. Nobody messed with how things were written, or dreamed of questioning a political opinion."
Following his departure from the Voice, Ridgeway was hired by Mother Jones to run its Washington, DC bureau. He continued working for the magazine until 2012. His topics included the demise of the social safety net, the racist far right's response to the election of Barack Obama, and the case of the Angola 3, three Black men held in solitary confinement for decades in Louisiana.
In 2008, he covered the Democratic primary elections, filmed interviewing Mike Gravel in New Hampshire, in which Gravel is interviewed on the phone by Neal Conan for NPR's, Talk of the Nation.