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Richard Stengel is an American editor. He is Time magazine's 16th managing editor.

Stengel is a native of New York. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University in 1977 and played on the Princeton Tigers basketball team as part of the 1975 National Invitation Tournament. After college, he was a Rhodes Scholar and studied English and history at Christ Church, Oxford. Stengel became a senior writer and essayist at Time, where he covered both the 1988 and 1996 presidential campaign. He also wrote for The New Yorker, The New Republic, "Spy", and the New York Times.

Stengel also authored several books including January Sun: One Day, Three Lives, A South African Town and You're too Kind: A Brief History of Flattery. In 1993 he collaborated with Nelson Mandela on Mandela's bestselling autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. He later served as co-producer of the 1996 documentary Mandela. In 1998, he taught a course at Princeton University called "Politics and the Press." In 1999, Stengel became a senior advisor and chief speechwriter for Bill Bradley, who ran for the Democratic nomination for the 2000 presidential election. Stengel later returned to print journalism and served in several positions at Time, including as nation and culture editor, and managing editor for Time.com. In 2004, Stengel became president and chief executive officer of the National Constitution Center, a museum and education center in Philadelphia. In 2006, he returned to Time magazine as managing editor.

Stengel is married to Mary Pfaff, who is originally from South Africa. They have two sons.

National Service Movement

In September 2007, Stengel wrote a TIME cover story called The Case For National Service in which he argued that Americans needed to redouble their efforts to get involved in community service and volunteerism, and that the presidential candidates needed to make the issue a top priority in the 2008 presidential campaign.^[1] Through this essay, Stengel became involved with national service groups Be the Change, City Year, Civic Enterprises, and others to form ServiceNation, a coalition of more than 100 organizations dedicated to promoting national service and volunteerism.^[2]

ServiceNation announced that it had secured both U.S. Presidential candidates to participate in Presidential Forum on National Service at Columbia University in New York City on September 11, 2008.^[3] Stengel served as co-moderator of the forum, along with PBS journalist Judy Woodruff, and both Senators Barack Obama and John McCain answered questions in front of a live audience at Columbia University about their plans for national service.^[4][5]

On September 12, 2008, Stengel was a featured speaker at the ServiceNation Summit in New York, along with Caroline Kennedy, former US Senator Hillary Clinton, former First Lady Laura Bush and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.^[6]. In February 2009, Stengel testified alongside Usher Raymond, former U.S. Senator Harris Wofford and others, in front of the United States House Committee on Education and Labor about the importance of national service.^[7]

Controversy

In November 2007, Stengel became the focus of a controversy after Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald exposed a number of factual errors^[8] in a column by Joe Klein.^[9] Time initially published a subsequent comment as follows: "In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don't." Greenwald noted that the text of the legislation does not require court review of individual targets, and Time's response, only repeating "what each side says," disregarded this fact.^[10][11] Time later changed the correction, changing "allow a court review" to "require a court approval" and inserting the sentence, "The bill does not explicitly say that."^[12]

Later, in an article titled "Time magazine refused to publish responses to Klein's false smears" Greenwald reported that TIME "refused the requests of two sitting members of Congress... to correct Klein's false statements in Time itself."^[13] TIME has, however, told Senator Russ Feingold that they intend to publish his letter to the editor in a coming issue.^[14][15]

Stengel is Time Magazine's managing editor.^[16] Deputy managing editor^[17] of Time Magazine Priscilla Painton is also involved in the controversy.^[18][19]

For only the second time since it was first used in Time Magazine, Richard Stengel approved the changing of the emblematic red border, this time to green^[20]. Stengel also approved the use of the Battle of Iwo Jima photo, by war photographer Joe Rosenthal.

The 21 April issue of TIME was entitled How to Win the War on Global Warming, and depicted the Marines raising a Sequoia tree, instead of the American flag. Donald Mates, an Iwo Jima veteran, told the Business & Media Institute on April 17 that using that photograph for that cause was a “disgrace.” Stengel supported the use of the image and exposed his point of view on journalism. “I think since I’ve been back at the magazine, I have felt that one of the things that’s needed in journalism is that you have to have a point of view about things,” Stengel said. “You can’t always just say ‘on the one hand, on the other’ and you decide. People trust us to make decisions. We’re experts in what we do. So I thought, you know what, if we really feel strongly about something let's just say so.”^[21]

See also

• Glenn Greenwald
• Jane Hamsher
• Priscilla Painton

References

Further reading

• Richard Stengel; January Sun: One Day, Three Lives, A South African Town; ISBN #0671732889
• Richard Stengel; You're Too Kind: A Brief History of Flattery; ISBN #0684854910
• Nelson Mandela; Long Walk to Freedom; ISBN #0316855006