The Washington Post opinion writer Jonathan Capehart was the recipient of the 2019 Randy Shilts Award for LGBTQ Coverage.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Capehart is an opinion writer for and a member of The Washington Post editorial board. He also hosts the “Cape Up” podcast at the paper and is an MSNBC Contributor, who regularly serves as a substitute anchor, and was the host of “America on the Line,” a 10-week daily news and national call-in show about the 2018 midterm elections from WNYC New York Public Radio. He was a Spring 2019 Fellow at the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Policy.
Capehart is a regular moderator of panels at the Aspen Ideas Festival and for the Aspen Institute, the Center for American Progress and at the Brussels Forum of the German Marshall Fund. He has also moderated sessions and conversations at the Atlantic’s Washington Ideas Forum, the 92nd Street Y and for the Connecticut Forum.
Between his column, podcast, panel moderating and substitute hosting, Capehart has interviewed important political leaders and cultural icons. Among them include, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Attorney General Eric Holder, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin. Capehart has also interviewed actor Mark Hamill, actress Sonia Braga, jazz greats Wynton Marsalis and Nancy Wilson, Academy Award-winning actor Christoph Waltz, dancer and choreographer Savion Glover, Bravo television’s Andy Cohen and Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
In September 2014, the Advocate magazine ranked Capehart 9th out of 50 of the most influential LGBT people in media. In December 2014, Mediaite named him one of the “Top 9 Rising Stars of Cable News.” Equality Forum made him a 2018 LGBT History Month Icon in October. Capehart has twice made the OUT 100 list, first in 1999 and again in 2000. In May 2018, the publisher of the Washington Post awarded him an “Outstanding Contribution Award” for his opinion writing and “Cape Up” podcast interviews.
Capehart was deputy editorial page editor of the New York Daily News from 2002 to 2004, and served on that paper’s editorial board from 1993 to 2000. In 1999, his 16-month editorial campaign to save the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem earned him and the board the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. Capehart left the Daily News in July 2000 to become the national affairs columnist at Bloomberg News, and took a leave from this position in February 2001 to serve as a policy adviser to Michael Bloomberg in his first successful campaign for New York City mayor.