Introduction
Margaret Carlson is an American journalist and a columnist for Bloomberg News. She was also a weekly panelist for CNN's Capital Gang from 1992 until its cancellation in 2005.
Biography
She is best known for being the first female columnist at Time magazine. Carlson joined Time in January 1988 from The New Republic, where she had been managing editor; in 1994, she became the first female columnist in the magazine's history. Carlson covered four presidential elections for TIME, but in 2005 she left for Bloomberg News where she writes a column.
Ms.Carlson spent a year after college working at the U.S. Department of Labor and three other agencies. During that year she lived on Yuma Street in Anacostia with her grandmother Nellie McCreary, a maid at the Hotel Washington (Washington, D.C.) and former nurse's aide at St. Elizabeth's Hospital. After that she taught third grade in Watts, Los Angeles, before joining Nader's raiders. After law school, she was briefly a Federal Trade Commission lawyer under Michael Pertschuk, until the Carter administration ended.
Her journalism career has included stints as Washington bureau chief for Esquire, editor of the short lived Washington Weekly, and was a reporter and member of the editorial staff for the Washington-based national weekly newspaper "Legal Times." She writes a weekly column for the Los Angeles Times. At CNN she was a commentator on Inside Politics, and for 15 years a panelist on The Capital Gang.
Carlson earned a B.A. in English from Penn State University and a law degree from George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C.
Ms. Carlson is an accomplished cook, baker, a serious home handyman, and amateur home improvement contractor. She has one daughter and lives in Washington, D.C.