Do we like David A. Graham?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Clean on harm and plainly on the right side in his reporting, but the public record on how he treats people is thin, so he stops short of the top end.
David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic, covering US politics and national affairs. He edited the magazine's politics section before that, and earlier reported for Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and The National. He's a Duke graduate who now teaches journalism there from his base in Durham, North Carolina.
His big recent project is a book, The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America, out in April 2025. It's a topic-by-topic guide to the Heritage Foundation's nearly 1,000-page blueprint and how the second Trump administration is putting it into practice. He did a round of interviews on it, including NPR's Fresh Air.
On Fresh Air he said the plan's authors want to push the federal government “as far to the right as they can as quickly as they can”. He also said the plan largely ignores climate change and that trans people don't exist in its vision. That's a reporter describing a document, not campaigning, but it shows which side of the harm question he's standing on.
On PBS's Amanpour and Company in November 2025 he said the White House hadn't backed up its claims of fraud in California's elections. He said occasional mail-in fraud isn't big enough to shift an election, and that the administration was using the government shutdown to decide what gets funded without Congress. Fact-led pushback on election-denial claims is the opposite of the grievance slide we watch for.
On the controversy front, honestly, there's nothing. Searches for lawsuits, corrections, allegations and complaints against him came back empty. Don't confuse him with other Grahams in the news, or with a different writer's Atlantic correction saga. We also found no 2026 news about him, so there's nothing fresh to report.
The good stuff is mostly the work itself. He's explaining a very long, dense policy document to ordinary readers, and he teaches the next crop of journalists at Duke. We didn't find charity or kind acts beyond that, and the record on his personal conduct is short. That's why this is a solid yes rather than a gushing one.