Margaret Carlson is an American journalist, political pundit, and an opinion columnist for Bloomberg News. She was also a regular panelist for CNN's Capital Gang from 1992 until its cancellation in 2005.

Carlson 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.

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 has won two National Headliner Awards as well as the Belva Ann Lockwood alumni award from George Washington University Law School. She serves on the boards of the German Marshall Fund and The Newseum. A former editor at The New Republic, Carlson has been a fellow at Harvard University's Institute of Politics, a Poynter Fellow at Yale University and a journalist-in-residence at the University of Notre Dame. She earned her bachelor's degree from Penn State University and a law degree from George Washington University Law School.

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