Charles Peters, founder and longtime editor of Washington Monthly, a bimonthly, nonprofit magazine, has died at age 96. According to The Washington Post, he considered himself  “the Don Quixote of journalism. On an anemic budget, he guided a low-circulation but influential muckraking periodical that for a time became a must-read in policymaking circles on Capitol Hill and in the White House.”

Launched in February 1969, continues The Post, “Washington Monthly trained a magnifying glass on the federal bureaucracy. The publication was likened at times to a self-appointed inspector general, such was its interest in holding obscure government agencies accountable.”

Peters vowed his magazine would probe Washington “the way that an anthropologist looks at a South Sea island” and “not from the standpoint of the outsider, but from the standpoint of the informed insider.”

Some of its best-known articles, states The Post, “questioned the fairness of the draft during the Vietnam War, revealed Army intelligence spying on civilian protesters in the United States and questioned the safety of the space shuttle’s booster rockets six years before the explosion of the Challenger in 1986.”

More here.

Image from 2001 interview on The Charlie Rose Show