Ranker

Anime Underground

Button Mash

Graveyard Shift

Total Nerd

Unspeakable Times

Weird History

Weird Nature

Weirdly Interesting

Sports

Music

Entertainment

Lifestyle

Culture

Food

Makeup

Halloween

Thanksgiving

Holidays

Watchworthy

HBO Max

pageType

Journalists

Whether&nbsp;as war reporters, news anchors, photographers or columnists, journalists certainly help&nbsp;to shape how&nbsp;the world perceive important events. So who have been&nbsp;the greatest journalists in history? Vote and add your picks

The Greatest Journalists of All Time | Best Journalists in History

The Greatest Journalists of All Time

Best People Lists, Top 10 People- Find any People List at Ranker

Person

People

Famous People List: The Top People Lists and Top 10s

people

sebbzor

Gender

Women

Gen Zs

Millenials

Gen Xers

Baby Boomers

Region

West Coast US

Mountain US

Midwest US

Southern US

Northeastern US

International

Michael Herr

Michael David Herr (April 13, 1940 – June 23, 2016) was an American writer and war correspondent, known as the author of Dispatches (1977), a memoir of his time as a correspondent for Esquire magazine (1967–1969) during the Vietnam War. The book was called the best "to have been written about the Vietnam War" by The New York Times Book Review. Novelist John le Carré called it "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." Herr later was credited with pioneering the literary genre of the nonfiction novel, along with authors such as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe.

George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell,  was an English novelist and essayist, journalist and critic, whose work is characterised by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism.As a writer, Orwell produced literary criticism and poetry, fiction and polemical journalism; and is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics and literature, language and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked George Orwell second among "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian" – describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices – is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", and "Hate week", "Room 101", the "memory hole", and "Newspeak", "doublethink" and  "proles", "unperson" and "thoughtcrime".

Ernie Pyle

Ernest Taylor Pyle (August 3, 1900 – April 18, 1945) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and war correspondent who is best known for his stories about ordinary American soldiers during World War II. Pyle is also notable for the columns he wrote as a roving, human-interest reporter from 1935 through 1941   for the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate that earned him wide acclaim for his simple accounts of ordinary people across North America. When the United States entered World War II, he lent the same distinctive, folksy style of his human-interest stories to his wartime reports from the European theater (1942–44) and Pacific theater (1945). Pyle won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his newspaper accounts of "dogface" infantry soldiers from a first-person perspective. He was killed by enemy fire on Iejima (then known as Ie Shima) during the Battle of Okinawa.
At the time of his death in 1945, Pyle was among the best-known American war correspondents. His syndicated column was published in 400 daily and 300 weekly newspapers nationwide. President Harry Truman was among those who paid tribute to Pyle: "No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told. He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen."

Robert Capa

Robert Capa (born Endre Ernő Friedmann; October 22, 1913 – May 25, 1954) was a Hungarian-born American war photographer and photojournalist as well as the companion and professional partner of photographer Gerda Taro. He is considered by some to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history.Capa fled political repression in Hungary when he was a teenager, moving to Berlin, where he enrolled in college. He witnessed the rise of Hitler, which led him to move to Paris, where he met and began to work with Gerta Pohorylle. Together they worked under the alias Robert Capa and became photojournalists. Though she contributed to much of the early work, she quickly created her own alias 'Gerda Taro' and they began to publish their work separately. He subsequently covered five wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and the First Indochina War, with his photos published in major magazines and newspapers.During his career he risked his life numerous times, most dramatically as the only civilian photographer landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day. He documented the course of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, and the liberation of Paris. His friends and colleagues included Ernest Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck and director John Huston.
In 1947, for his work recording World War II in pictures, U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower awarded Capa the Medal of Freedom. That same year, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris. The organization was the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers. Hungary has issued a stamp and a gold coin in his honor.

Joe Sacco

Joe Sacco (; born October 2, 1960) is a Maltese-American cartoonist and journalist. He is best known for his comics journalism, in particular in the books Palestine (1996) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009), on Israeli–Palestinian relations; and Safe Area Goražde (2000) and The Fixer (2003) on the Bosnian War.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and sportsman. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two non-fiction works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.
Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he was a reporter for a few months for The Kansas City Star before leaving for the Italian Front to enlist as an ambulance driver in World War I. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929).
In 1921, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of four wives. They moved to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s "Lost Generation" expatriate community. His debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926. He divorced his wife in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer; they divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War, where he had been a journalist. He based For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) on his experience there. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940; they separated after he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II. He was present with the troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris.
Hemingway went on safari to Africa shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea (1952), where he was almost killed in two successive plane crashes that left him in pain and ill-health for much of the rest of his life. In 1959, he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho where he ended his own life in mid-1961.

Dexter Filkins

Dexter Price Filkins (born May 24, 1961) is an American journalist known primarily for his coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for The New York Times. He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his dispatches from Afghanistan, and he won a Pulitzer in 2009 as part of a team of Times reporters for their dispatches from Pakistan and Afghanistan. He has been referred to as "the premier combat journalist of his generation". He currently writes for The New Yorker.

Martha Gellhorn

Martha Ellis Gellhorn (November 8, 1908 – February 15, 1998) was an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist who is considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century. She reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career. Gellhorn was also the third wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, from 1940 to 1945. She died in 1998 in an apparent suicide at the age of 89, ill and almost completely blind. The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism is named after her.

William Howard Russell

Sir William Howard Russell  (28 March 1820, Tallaght, County Dublin, Ireland – 11 February 1907, London, England) was an Irish reporter with The Times, and is considered to have been one of the first modern war correspondents. He spent 22 months covering the Crimean War, including the Siege of Sevastopol and the Charge of the Light Brigade. He later covered events during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the American Civil War, the Austro-Prussian War, and the Franco-Prussian War.

Vasily Grossman

Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Russian: Васи́лий Семёнович Гро́ссман, Ukrainian: Василь Семенович Гроссман; 12 December (29 November, Julian calendar) 1905 – 14 September 1964) was a Russian writer and journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Ukraine, then a part of the Russian Empire, Grossman trained as a chemical engineer at Moscow State University, earning the nickname Vasya-khimik (Vasya the Chemist) because of his diligence as a student. Upon graduation he took a job in Stalino (now Donetsk) in the Donets Basin. In the 1930s he changed careers. He began writing full-time and published a number of short stories and several novels. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was engaged as a war correspondent by the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda; he wrote first-hand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin. Grossman's eyewitness reports of a Nazi extermination camp, following the discovery of Treblinka, were among the earliest accounts of a Nazi death camp by a reporter.
While Grossman was never arrested by the Soviet authorities, his two major literary works (Life and Fate and Forever Flowing) were censored during the ensuing Nikita Khrushchev period as unacceptably anti-Soviet, and Grossman himself became in effect a nonperson. The KGB raided Grossman's flat after he had completed Life and Fate, seizing manuscripts, notes and even the ribbon from the typewriter on which the text had been written. Grossman was told by the Communist Party's chief ideologist Mikhail Suslov that the book could not be published for two or three hundred years. At the time of Grossman's death from stomach cancer in 1964 these books remained unreleased. Hidden copies were eventually smuggled out of the Soviet Union by a network of dissidents, including Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Voinovich, and first published in the West, before appearing in the Soviet Union in 1988.

Jeremy Paxman

Jeremy Dickson Paxman (born 11 May 1950) is a British broadcaster, journalist, author, and television presenter. Born in Leeds, Paxman was educated at Malvern College and St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he edited the undergraduate newspaper Varsity. At Cambridge, he was a member of a Labour Party club and described himself as a socialist, although in later life described himself as a one-nation conservative. He joined the BBC in 1972, initially at BBC Radio Brighton, although relocated to London in 1977. In coming years, he worked on Tonight and Panorama before becoming a newsreader for the BBC Six O'Clock News and later a presenter on Breakfast Time.
In 1989, he became a presenter for the BBC Two programme Newsnight, during which he interviewed a wide number of political figures. Paxman became known for his forthright and abrasive interviewing style, particularly when interrogating politicians. These appearances were sometimes criticised as aggressive, intimidating and condescending, yet also applauded as tough and incisive. In 2014, Paxman left Newsnight after 25 years as its presenter. Since then, he has done occasional work for Channel 4 News. Since its revival in 1994, he has been the presenter of University Challenge.

Hannah Arendt

Johanna "Hannah" Cohn Arendt (, also US: , German: [ˈaːʁənt]; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975), also known as Hannah Arendt Bluecher, was a German-American philosopher and political theorist. Her many books and articles on topics ranging from totalitarianism to epistemology have had a lasting influence on political theory. Arendt is widely considered one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century.
Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany but mostly raised in Königsberg in a secular merchant Jewish culture by parents who were politically progressive, being supporters of the Social Democrats. Her father died when she was seven, so she was raised by her mother and grandfather. After completing her secondary education, she studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a brief affair, and he had a lasting influence on her thinking. She obtained her doctorate in philosophy in 1929 at the University of Heidelberg with Karl Jaspers.
Hannah Arendt married Günther Stern in 1929, but soon began to encounter increasing antisemitism in 1930s Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and while researching antisemitic propaganda for the Zionist Federation of Germany in Berlin that year, Arendt was denounced and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo. On release, she fled Germany, living in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland before settling in Paris. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Divorcing Stern in 1937, she married Heinrich Blücher in 1940, but when Germany invaded France in 1940 she was detained by the French as an alien, despite having been stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. She escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941 via Portugal. She settled in New York, which remained her principal residence for the rest of her life. She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950. With the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, her reputation as a thinker and writer was established and a series of seminal works followed. These included The Human Condition in 1958, as well as Eichmann in Jerusalem and On Revolution in 1963. She taught at many American universities, while declining tenure-track appointments. She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, at the age of 69, leaving her last work, The Life of the Mind, unfinished.

Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of power and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. In the popular mind she is best remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered an apologia, and for the phrase "the banality of evil". She is commemorated by institutions and journals devoted to her thinking, the Hannah Arendt Prize for political thinking, and on stamps, street names and schools, amongst other things.

Seymour Hersh

Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker magazine on national security matters and has also written for the London Review of Books since 2013.Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered Watergate for The New York Times and revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia. In 2004, he reported on the US military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and five George Polk Awards. In 2004, he received the George Orwell Award.In recent years, Hersh has stirred controversy by accusing the Obama administration of lying about the death of Osama bin Laden and by disputing that the Assad regime used chemical weapons on Syrian civilians in the Syrian Civil War.

Edward R. Murrow

Edward Roscoe Murrow (born Egbert Roscoe Murrow; April 25, 1908 – April 27, 1965) was an American broadcast journalist and war correspondent. He first gained prominence during World War II with a series of live radio broadcasts from Europe for the news division of CBS. During the war he recruited and worked closely with a team of war correspondents who came to be known as the Murrow Boys.
A pioneer of radio and television news broadcasting, Murrow produced a series of reports on his television program See It Now which helped lead to the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Fellow journalists Eric Sevareid, Ed Bliss, Bill Downs, Dan Rather, and Alexander Kendrick consider Murrow one of journalism's greatest figures, noting his honesty and integrity in delivering the news.

Edward R. Murrow was an American actor who has appeared in his role in "Around the World in 80 Days." Murrow won a Primetime Emmy Award in 1959.

Don McCullin

Sir Donald McCullin, CBE, Hon FRPS (born 9 October 1935), is a  British photojournalist, particularly recognized for his war photography and images of urban strife. His career, which began in 1959, has specialised in examining the underside of society, and his photographs have depicted the unemployed, downtrodden and the impoverished.

Peter Bergen

Peter Bergen (born December 12, 1962) is a British-American journalist and author who serves as CNN's national security analyst, New America's vice president, and as a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He produced the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997. The interview, which aired on CNN, marked the first time that bin Laden declared war against the United States to a Western audience.Bergen has written or edited seven books: Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (2001), The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader (2006), The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda (2011), Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad (2012), Talibanistan: Negotiating the Borders Between Terror, Politics, and Religion (2013), Drone Wars: Transforming Conflict, Law, and Policy (2014), and United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists (2016). Three of the books were New York Times bestsellers, four of the books were named among the best non-fiction books of the year by the Washington Post and they have been translated into twenty-one languages.

Christiane Amanpour

Christiane Maria Heideh Amanpour  ( (listen); Persian: كرستين امانپور‎, romanized: Kristiane Amānpur; born 12 January 1958) is a British-Iranian journalist and television host. Amanpour is the Chief International Anchor for CNN and host of CNN International's nightly interview program Amanpour. She is also the host of Amanpour & Company on PBS.

Mike Wallace

Myron Leon "Mike" Wallace (May 9, 1918 – April 7, 2012) was an American journalist, game show host, actor, and media personality. He interviewed a wide range of prominent newsmakers during his seven-decade career. He was one of the original correspondents for CBS' 60 Minutes, which debuted in 1968. Wallace retired as a regular full-time correspondent in 2006, but still appeared occasionally on the series until 2008.
He interviewed many politicians, celebrities, and academics, such as Pearl S. Buck, Deng Xiaoping, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Jiang Zemin, Ruhollah Khomeini, Kurt Waldheim, Frank Lloyd Wright, Yasser Arafat, Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat, Manuel Noriega, John Nash, Gordon B. Hinckley, Vladimir Putin, Maria Callas, Barbra Streisand, Salvador Dalí, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mickey Cohen, Jimmy Fratianno, and Ayn Rand.

Mike Wallace was an American actor and writer who was known for his role in "Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life." Wallace won a Golden Globe Award in 1958.

Walter Cronkite

Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. (November 4, 1916 – July 17, 2009) was an American broadcast journalist who served as anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years (1962–1981). During the heyday of CBS News in the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the most trusted man in America" after being so named in an opinion poll.He reported many events from 1937 to 1981, including bombings in World War II; the Nuremberg trials; combat in the Vietnam War; the Dawson's Field hijackings; Watergate; the Iran Hostage Crisis; and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, civil rights pioneer Martin Luther King Jr., and Beatles musician John Lennon.
He was also known for his extensive coverage of the U.S. space program, from Project Mercury to the Moon landings to the Space Shuttle. He was the only non-NASA recipient of an Ambassador of Exploration award.Cronkite is well known for his departing catchphrase, "And that's the way it is," followed by the date of the broadcast.

Truman Capote

Truman Garcia Capote (; born Truman Streckfus Persons, September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984) was an American novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from his work.
Capote rose above a childhood troubled by divorce, a long absence from his mother, and multiple migrations. He had discovered his calling as a writer by the age of 8, and for the rest of his childhood he honed his writing ability. Capote began his professional career writing short stories. The critical success of one story, "Miriam" (1945), attracted the attention of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, and resulted in a contract to write the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Capote earned the most fame with In Cold Blood, a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home. Capote spent four years writing the book aided by his lifelong friend Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).A milestone in popular culture, In Cold Blood was the peak of Capote's literary career. In the 1970s, he maintained his celebrity status by appearing on television talk shows.

Nick Davies

Nicholas Davies (born 28 March 1953) is a British investigative journalist, writer and documentary maker.
Davies has written extensively as a freelancer, as well as for The Guardian and The Observer, and been named Reporter of the Year, Journalist of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year at the British Press Awards.Davies has made documentaries for ITV's World in Action and written numerous books on the subject of politics and journalism, including Flat Earth News, which attracted considerable controversy as an exposé of journalistic malpractice in the UK and around the globe. As a reporter for The Guardian, Davies was responsible for uncovering  the News of the World phone hacking affair, including the July 2011 revelations of hacking into the mobile phone voicemail of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger (born January 17, 1962) is an American journalist, author and filmmaker. He is noted for his book The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (1997), which became a bestseller; and for his documentary films Restrepo (2010) and Korengal (2014), which won awards. He also wrote the book War (2010).

Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk (born 12 July 1946) is an English writer and journalist. He has been Middle East correspondent intermittently since 1976 for various media; since 1989 he has been correspondent for The Independent, based in Beirut. Fisk has many British and international journalism awards, including the Press Awards Foreign Reporter of the Year seven times. He is an author and has reported on wars and armed conflicts.
An Arabic speaker, he was among the few Western journalists to interview Osama bin Laden, which he did three times between 1993 and 1997.

Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch (born 1961), an American author and journalist, is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a former editor of The Paris Review. His most recent book is The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (2008), an account of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison under the American occupation. He became widely known for his first book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (1998), which tells the story of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.

Peter Jennings

Peter Charles Archibald Ewart Jennings  (July 29, 1938 – August 7, 2005) was a Canadian-American journalist who served as the sole anchor of ABC World News Tonight from 1983 until his death from lung cancer in 2005. He dropped out of high school, yet he transformed himself into one of American television's most prominent journalists.
Jennings started his career early, hosting a Canadian radio show at age 9. He began his professional career with CJOH-TV in Ottawa during its early years, anchoring the local newscasts and hosting the teen dance show Saturday Date on Saturdays. In 1965, ABC News tapped him to anchor its flagship evening news program. Critics and others in the television news business attacked his inexperience, making his job difficult. He became a foreign correspondent in 1968, reporting from the Middle East.
Jennings returned as one of World News Tonight's three anchormen in 1978, and he was promoted to sole anchorman in 1983. He was also known for his marathon coverage of breaking news stories, staying on the air for 15 hours or more to anchor the live broadcast of events such as the Gulf War in 1991, the Millennium celebrations in 2000, and the September 11 attacks in 2001. In addition to anchoring, he was the host of many ABC News special reports and moderated several American presidential debates. He was always fascinated with the United States and became an American citizen in 2003.
Jennings was one of the "Big Three" news anchormen, along with Tom Brokaw of NBC and Dan Rather of CBS, who dominated American evening network news from the early 1980s until his death in 2005, which closely followed the retirements of Brokaw in 2004 and Rather in 2005.

Whether&nbsp;as war reporters, news anchors, photographers or columnists, journalists certainly help&nbsp;to shape how&nbsp;the world perceive important ...