Doug Ireland

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Doug Ireland

Doug Ireland (b. 1946) is an American journalist and blogger who writes about politics, power, media, and also about gay issues. His writing currently appears regularly in The Nation, LA Weekly, Gay City News, The Advocate, and TomPaine.com, and in many other publications both here and abroad. He is based in New York City.

Ireland began his journalism career at the New York Post when it was still owned by Dorothy Schiff and considered the most liberal daily newspaper in the U.S. He lived for ten years in France, writing on European politics and culture for various publications; and he has continued to write frequently about French and European politics and foreign affairs. Ireland has been an assiduous promoter in the United States of the work of the prolific young French philosopher Michel Onfray.

Ireland has been a columnist for the Village Voice, the New York Observer New York magazine, and the Paris daily Libération, among other publications He is also a contributing editor of POZ, the monthly for the HIV-positive community, and of the magazine In These Times.

A severe critic from the left of Bill Clinton's presidency, Ireland for three years wrote a syndicated Clinton Watch column.He wrote extensively in opposition to the two invasions of Iraq by Bush pere and fils, and against the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

Ireland was part of the early 1960s American new left. He was a member of Students for a Democratic Society, and was elected to its National Council in 1963 at the age of 17. He also spent a year on the SDS national staff, as Assistant National Secretary, in 1963-64. Ireland dropped out of SDS in 1966 to devote his time to electoral organizing against the Vietnam war. As a staff member of the New Jersey Industrial Union Council AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers Region 9-A, in 1967 he helped to organize the National Labor Leaderhip Assembly for Peace to oppose the Vietnam war.

An early member of the Dump Johnson movement, Ireland was recruited for the staff of the presidential campaign of the man who became the anti-war candidate of the Dump Johnson movement, Senator Eugene McCarthy, for whom Ireland coordinated the Mid-Atlantic region of states. Following the 1968 Democratic National Convention (at which he coordinated McCarthy's labor support and helped organize demonstrations by Convention delegates against police brutality targeting anti-war demonstrators) Ireland went to Long Island to help run the successful campaign for Congress by Allard Lowenstein, considered the principal founder of the Dump Johnson movement. After a stint as a journalist on the New York Post and then on the Community News Service (a short-lived wire service providing news of the black, Latino, and other minority racial communuities), he resigned to manage the successful 1970 anti-Vietnam war campaign for Congress by Bella Abzug, making her the first left radical to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives since Vito Marcantonio. He also managed Abzug's 1976 campaign for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator from New York, which Abzug narrowly lost by 0.10 per cent of the vote to Daniel Patrick Moynihan. After that, Ireland returned full-time to journalism in 1977, and has remained a journalist since.