Spencer Ackerman is a blogger and senior correspondent for The American Prospect. He attended Rutgers University where he was an editor for the Daily Targum student paper. He then became an intern and later an associate editor at The New Republic magazine. He initially supported the Iraq War, but became disillusioned and in 2004 started a blog on The New Republic website called Iraq'd which chronicled the dilemma of pro-war liberals. He also wrote, with John B. Judis, an article that started the chain of events that led to the Plame affair. In 2006 he was fired by The New Republic Editor Franklin Foer. Describing it as a "painful" decision, Foer attributed the firing to Ackerman's "insubordination": disparaging the magazine on his personal blog Too Hot For TNR, saying that he would "skullfuck" a terrorist's corpse at an editorial meeting if that was required to "establish his anti-terrorist bona fides" and sending Foer an e-mail where he said -- in what according to Ackerman was intended to be a joke -- he would "make a niche in your skull" with a baseball bat. Ackerman, by contrast, argued that the dismissal was due to "irreconcilable ideological differences". He believed that his leftward drift as a result of the Iraq War and the actions of the Bush administration was not appreciated by the senior editorial staff. [1] Within 24 hours of being fired by The New Republic, Ackerman gained his current job at competing magazine, The American Prospect. Ackerman has no regrets over anything he wrote or said but in retrospect believes that he should have quit. [2] In the spring of 2007 he was embedded in Iraq.
Ackerman is a fan of comic books and hardcore records. He has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and BloggingHeads.tv