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Mortimer Benjamin "Mort" Zuckerman (born June 4, 1937)[2] is a Canadian-born American media proprietor, magazine editor, and investor. He is the co-founder, executive chairman and former CEO of Boston Properties, one of the largest real estate investment trusts in the United States. Zuckerman is also the owner and publisher of the New York Daily News and of U.S. News & World Report, where he serves as editor-in-chief. He formerly owned The Atlantic and Fast Company. His personal net worth is estimated at $2.7 billion.[3]
As of 2014, it is owned and run by Mortimer Zuckerman, and is headquartered at 4 New York Plaza in Lower Manhattan.
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After graduating, Zuckerman remained at Harvard Business School as an associate professor for nine years. He also taught at Yale University. Zuckerman spent seven years at the real estate firm Cabot, Cabot & Forbes, where he rose to the position of senior vice president and chief financial officer.[9]
In 1980, he purchased the literary magazine The Atlantic Monthly, where he was the chairman from 1980 to 1999. In 1999 he sold the magazine to David G. Bradley for US$12 million. Commenting on this sale and that of Fast Company magazine, which he sold for $365 million at the height of the tech boom in 2000, he quipped, "I averaged out."[8]
While he still owned Atlantic Monthly, in 1984, Mortimer Zuckerman bought U.S. News & World Report, where he remains its editor-in-chief.
Politics
In addition to his publishing and real-estate interests, Zuckerman is also a frequent commentator on world affairs, both as an editorialist and on television. He regularly appears on MSNBC and The McLaughlin Group and writes columns for U.S. News & World Report and the New York Daily News.
While Zuckerman has varied in his party affiliations over time,[10] since the late 1970s, he has donated more than $68,000 to US political candidates, with $42,700 going to Democratic politicians and $24,000 to independent interests.[11]
On July 12, 2010, Zuckerman said in an interview that he had helped to write one of President Barack Obama's political speeches.[12] Long-time Obama speechwriters Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes disputed that and asserted that neither "has ever met or spoken to Mort Zuckerman."[13] Zuckerman later published a clarification of his remarks by stating that his help had come in the form of private conversations with various political officials in which he had offered advice and perspective on different issues.[14]
Zuckerman, a long-time supporter of the Democratic party who cast his vote for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, was critical of President Obama on several fronts. Following the downgrade of US treasury debt by Standard & Poor's in 2011, Zuckerman wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "I long for a triple-A president to run a triple-A country."[15] After initially supporting Obama's call for heavy infrastructure spending to revive the economy, Zuckerman criticized the composition of the plan: "if you look at the make-up of the stimulus program, roughly half of it went to state and local municipalities, which is in effect to the municipal unions which are at the core of the Democratic party."[15]
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Between 2001 and 2003, Zuckerman was the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Typically, the nominating committee attempts to choose a person who is both respected and uncontroversial. However, Zuckerman was widely opposed by liberal Jewish factions.[22][23] Nonetheless, Zuckerman was eventually elected and served a full term.
In their 2006 paper The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer, political science professor at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, academic dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, named Zuckerman a member of the media wing of the "Israeli lobby" in the United States.[24] Zuckerman replied: "I would just say this: The allegations of this disproportionate influence of the Jewish community remind me of the 92-year-old man sued in a paternity suit. He said he was so proud; he pleaded guilty."[24]
President George W. Bush appointed Zuckerman to serve on the Honorary Delegation to accompany him to Jerusalem for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel in May 2008.[25][26]
Appointments and associations
Zuckerman serves on the boards of trustees of several educational and private institutions such as New York University, the Aspen Institute, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Hole in the Wall Gang Fund, and the Center for Communications. He is a member of the JPMorgan's National Advisory Board, the Council on Foreign Relations,[27] the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He has been a president of the board of trustees of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
Zuckerman is known to be a mentor to and close associate of Daniel M. Snyder,[28] owner of the NFL football team Washington Redskins, and has been a financial backer to Snyder's business ventures (CampusUSA magazine),[29] and was a shareholder and director in Snyder Communications Inc.,[30] a marketing services business which was taken over in 2000 (by Havas Advertising).
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