David Aaronovitch

David Aaronovitch (born 8 July 1954) is a British author, broadcaster, and journalist. He is a regular columnist for The Times, and author of Paddling to Jerusalem: An Aquatic Tour of Our Small Country (2000) and Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History (2009). He won the Orwell Prize for political journalism in 2001, and the What the Papers Say "Columnist of the Year" award for 2003.

Aaronovitch is the son of the economist, Communist and intellectual Sam Aaronovitch, and brother of the actor Owen Aaronovitch and scriptwriter and author Ben Aaronovitch. He attended Gospel Oak Primary School until 1965, Holloway County Comprehensive 1965-68, and William Ellis School 1968-72, all in London.

He studied Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford from October 1973 until April 1974, when he was sent down (expelled) for failing the German part of his History exams. He completed his education at the Victoria University of Manchester, graduating in 1978 with a 2:1 BA (Hons) in History. While at Manchester, he was a member of the 1975 University Challenge team that lost in the first round after answering most questions with the name of a marxist ("Trotsky", "Lenin", "Karl Marx" or "Che Guevara"); the team's tactics were a protest against the fact that the Oxford and Cambridge universities can enter each of their colleges in the contest as a separate team, even though the individual colleges are not universities in themselves.

He was initially a Eurocommunist. He was also active in the National Union of Students (NUS) where he got to know the president at the time, Charles Clarke, who later became Home Secretary. Aaronovitch himself succeeded Trevor Phillips as president of the NUS from 1980 to 1982. He was elected on a Broad Left ticket. He has written that he was brought up "to react to wealth with a puritanical pout".

Interviewed on the same day and for the same job as Peter Mandelson, he started his media career as a television researcher on ITV's Weekend World, later becoming a producer. He moved to the BBC as founding editor of the On the Record in 1988. He moved to print journalism in 1995, working for The Independent and Independent on Sunday as chief leader writer, television critic, parliamentary sketch writer and columnist remaining there until the end of 2002.

For the New Statesman he wrote a pseudonymous column purporting to be the diary of 'Lynton Charles, MP'. Charles and Lynton are Tony Blair's middle names. He began contributing to The Guardian and The Observer in 2003, where he was a columnist and feature writer. Since June 2005, he has written a regular column for The Times and regularly writes columns for The Jewish Chronicle. He also presents or contributes to radio and television programmes, including the BBC's Have I Got News For You and BBC News 24. In 2004 he presented The Norman Way, a three-part BBC Radio 4 documentary looking at regime change in 1066.

In his columns, he takes an iconoclastic view, often upsetting former allies on the left, most notably through his strong support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Since the invasion he has taken the view that it liberated Iraqis, and he has downplayed the significance of Iraq's putative weapons of mass destruction, of which he wrote in 2003: "Those weapons had better be there". Aaronovitch has been critical of attacks on Jewish people who criticise Israeli treatment of the Palestinians.

In late 2005 Aaronovitch was co-author, with blogger Oliver Kamm and journalist Francis Wheen, of a complaint to The Guardian after it published an apology to Noam Chomsky for an interview by Emma Brockes in which she asserted that Chomsky denied the Srebrenica massacre.A Guardian readers' editor found that the newspaper had misrepresented Chomsky's position on the Srebrenica massacre, and his judgement was upheld in May 2006 by an external ombudsman, John Willis, In his report for The Guardian, Willis detailed his reasons for rejecting the argument put forward by Aaronovitch and the others.