Meg Greenfield Elected to Newspaper Hall of Fame

Meg Greenfield, former editorial page editor for The Washington Post and columnist for Newsweek, has been elected to the Maryland-Delaware-District of Columbia Newspaper Hall of Fame, a program of the Maryland-Delaware-District of Columbia Press Association (MDDC) honoring outstanding newspaper professionals whose careers were marked by excellence at newspapers in the region.

When she is inducted in March, Greenfield will join 37 other newspaper men and women who have been similarly honored over the years and whose careers span nearly three centuries.

“Meg Greenfield was a courageous journalist and a trailblazer for women in the newspaper and magazine business,” said MDDC President John League, publisher of The Herald-Mail. “It’s an honor to recognize her contributions to journalism.”

Greenfield, who died in 1999, joined The Post in July 1968 as an editorial writer and was named deputy editor of the editorial page in 1969. In 1978 she won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing for pieces about international affairs, civil rights and the press. In 1979 she became editor of the editorial page.

“For more than 30 years, Greenfield helped shape The Post’s views on issues ranging from war and peace to home rule for the District of Columbia and the proclivity of some drivers to run red lights,” said J.Y. Smith in her obituary.

Greenfield’s selection to the Hall of Fame is a “good choice” and  “adds luster to the award,” said Hall of Fame Committee Chairman Jim Flood, Sr., publisher of the Dover Post Company.

“Meg Greenfield made her considerable mark in the world of journalism by combining hard work and fairness with wit and keen insight,” added Flood.

“Meg was one of a kind; wise, independent-minded, and funny,” said Donald E. Graham, chairman of The Washington Post and publisher of the newspaper during Greenfield’s tenure. “She had the keenest ethical sense of any journalist I ever met.”

Graham added, “On behalf of her friends and colleagues at The Post, I am honored at her selection and thank MDDC’s directors for choosing her.”

Greenfield, a native of Seattle, WA, graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1952 and attended Cambridge University as a Fulbright Scholar for one year. Before joining The Post, she was director of research for the New York committee of Adlai E. Stevenson during the 1956 presidential election. In 1957 she joined Reporter, a magazine of political commentary, where she became Washington editor in 1965.

In 1974, she began a column in Newsweek, which is owned by The Washington Post Company. It dealt primarily with Washington life, a subject that, “contrary to widespread belief,” she explained, “does not exclude everything human.”

Greenfield had a reputation among her colleagues for being “fearless, tireless, mysterious, funny tough…supremely confident, but engagingly self-deprecating,” said David Von Drehle, a Washington Post writer, following her death.  

Columnist Charles Krauthammer said she made the editorial pages of The Post the best in the country. “She did it by applying the same talents that served her so well as a writer and columnist; a quick and deep intellect, a fine pen and a total allergy to spin and bull…She was a great student, critic, analyst, debunker and in the end, shaper of power.”

The MDDC Newspaper Hall of Fame is located in the Journalism Building at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park. Its honorees come from rural weekly papers and big-city dailies and include former Herald-Mail publisher Jim Schurz, former Capital-Gazette executive editor Edward Casey, and former Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham.

The MDDC Press Association is a nonprofit organization of 165 newspapers whose membership consists of all of the daily newspapers and most of the non-daily newspapers in Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia.