Mary Deibel, a journalist who covered Washington, D.C., for the Scripps Howard newspapers, died of cancer May 3, 2013. She was 65.
Deibel graduated from Duke in 1970 and received a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1972. She was a reporter for three years for The News Journal in Wilmington, Del. In 1975–76, she was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in the non-degree visiting student program at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School.
In 1976 she joined the Memphis Commercial Appeal (a Scripps Howard newspaper), and spent four years as a columnist and editorial writer in Memphis. In 1980, she became that newspaper’s Washington bureau chief. After six years, she became a national correspondent for the Scripps Howard chain, and retired in 2006.
Deibel covered Congress, the Supreme Court, economics, the White House, and every presidential election from 1976 through 2004. Ann McFeatters, a Scripps Howard columnist, said of Deibel, “She was a tenacious journalist who thrived on getting the facts. She never wrote something she hadn’t checked out thoroughly. She never put her opinion in a news story, and she never, ever psychoanalyzed the people she covered.”
Deibel is survived by her aunt, Carolyn Stern; and four cousins.
Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.