Michael C. Moynihan

Michael Christopher Moynihan (born August 24, 1974) is an American journalist, former National Correspondent for Vice News and co-host of The Fifth Column podcast.

He was previously the cultural news editor for The Daily Beast, the managing editor of Vice magazine, and a senior editor of the libertarian magazine Reason.

Moynihan was also a resident fellow of the free-market think tank Timbro in Sweden, where he lived and wrote articles about politics in the country, contributing to Swedish-language publications, including Expressen, Aftonbladet, Sveriges Television, Neo and Göteborgs-Tidningen.

According to Media Bistro, "Moynihan is perhaps best known for breaking the story on Jonah Lehrer's fabrications."

Moynihan attended Concord-Carlisle High School in Concord, MA and graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.

Moynihan founded the Stockholm Spectator, an English-language website based in Stockholm, Sweden.

According to Sveriges Radio, the site was originally intended to be a print publication modeled on The Village Voice.

Writers were mainly English-speaking expatriates living in Sweden.

"Despite the fact that so many Swedes speak and read in English there were almost no English-language newspapers in Sweden," said Moynihan to Sveriges Radio in 2004.

It maintained a focus on criticism of the media, but also dealt with current topics in politics and music.

Moynihan began serving on the editorial board of the Swedish magazine Neo in 2006 along with Peter Wolodarski and Theodore Paues.

Swedish politician Carl Bildt sat on the board of the publication.

During a controversy in 2006 where the website SD-Kuriren was criticized by the Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs Laila Freivalds for publishing satires of the Islamic prophet, Muhammad, the website was taken down by its provider.

As editor of the Stockholm Spectator, Moynihan reacted to what he viewed as suppression of freedom of the press, and posted to the blog of the magazine one of the more offensive of the caricatures of Muhammad.

He was a resident fellow at the organization Timbro, a free-market think tank based in Stockholm.

He lived in Sweden and wrote articles about the politics of the country.

Moynihan has contributed articles to Swedish-language publications, including Expressen, Aftonbladet, Sveriges Television, Neo, and Göteborgs-Tidningen.

Moynihan was the producer of a 2006 documentary for Modern Times Group of Sweden's TV8, on American conservative radio talk show host Barry Farber.

He performed research for Timbro in 2007 in which he wrote critically of Noam Chomsky's research methods, and argued that Chomsky did not deserve an honorary doctorate he received at Uppsala University.

Moynihan was an associate editor for Reason prior to serving as its senior editor, having joined the staff of the magazine in August 2007.

His December 24, 2007, article for Reason, "Flunking Free Speech: The Persistent Threat to Liberty on College Campuses" was cited by Robert H. Jackson Legal Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Azhar Majeed, in the legal journal The Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy in 2009.

Moynihan was a contributor to the Los Angeles Times in 2008.

After Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in November 2008, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution highlighted critical comments by Moynihan of the President-Elect's supporters, in a sample of political viewpoints following the election.

He conducted interviews for Reason.tv in 2009.

In 2010, he was a visiting fellow at Timbro.

Moynihan is the senior editor of both Reason magazine, and its website, Reason.com.

He resided in Washington, D.C., in 2010.

Moynihan announced his participation in the protest movement "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" which began in May 2010.

The movement grew in response to censorship by Comedy Central of an episode of South Park which depicted the Prophet Muhammad.

Moynihan stated he would post his own contributions in addition to submissions from other individuals to the website of Reason on the protest movement's scheduled date of May 20, 2010.

He encouraged his readers to send him their drawings.

Moynihan stated he planned to select some of his favorite depictions of Muhammad from the protest movement, and then add them to the Reason.com website.

Moynihan commented, "In the South Park episode that started all this, Buddha does lines of coke and there was an episode where Cartman started a Christian rock band that sang very homo-erotic songs. Yet there is one religious figure we can't make fun of. The point of the episode that started the controversy is that celebrities wanted Muhammad's power not to be ridiculed. How come non-Muslims aren't allowed to make jokes?"

Moynihan noted, "Any time you cave into terrorism, it emboldens extremists," and posited that the decision of Comedy Central to enact self-censorship of the South Park episode would have the impact of worsening the situation.

In a February 2011 book review for The Wall Street Journal, Moynihan provided evidence that British author Dominic Sandbrook was guilty of "[r]ecycling the phrasing, the descriptive adjectives, the reportorial detail of other historians—in other words, ignoring the codes and courtesies of historical scholarship."

The next year, Moynihan told the New York Observer that he had been surprised to see Sandbrook's book "published in paperback with no corrections."

In 2011, Moynihan left Reason to become managing editor of Vice magazine, which he left the next year to work at The Daily Beast.

Moynihan contributed the "Righteous Gentile" column to Tablet magazine in 2012 and 2013.

In his column, he maintained that the news network Russia Today (RT) is a propaganda outlet, examined the Polish reaction to President Obama's reference in a speech to World War II "Polish death camps," accused New York congressional candidate Charles Barron of being anti-Semitic, and reflected on the advice of Israel's ambassador to Denmark that "in certain areas of Copenhagen, it's best to keep your Judaism to yourself."

A Moynihan article that appeared in Tablet Magazine on July 30, 2012, contained evidence that New Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer had fabricated Bob Dylan quotations and led to Lehrer's resignation and to the withdrawal of two of his three books from circulation.