As a young man, Alexander Cockburn, who has died from cancer at the age of 71, had something of the air of the classic Bollinger Bolshevik: elegant, with his blue shades and his Gauloises cigarettes, well-connected and perversely radical politically. In reality he was more interesting and more admirable, a contrarian who despised cant. He had the courage to take on anything and anyone, from the most powerful organisations in the world to his closest friends, and the energy and persistence to follow his own path wherever it took him.
The sheer volume of his journalism over 50 years was enormous. It ranged from the student newspaper Cherwell at Oxford to the magazine, CounterPunch, that he co-edited in recent years from the remote hamlet of Petrolia (formerly New Jerusalem) in northern California, by way of the Nation, the Village Voice and every radical magazine known or hardly known in America. Two examples suggest the sweeping violence and the wry humour of his style.
Cockburn took dry issue with his lifetime friend and rival Christopher Hitchens's monstering of Mother Teresa: if you were starving in a Bombay gutter, he asked, loftily unconcerned that Teresa operated in Kolkata, "Who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup?"
Only a few weeks ago, he deprecated the fashion for finding signs of fascism in European politics. "If there's any nation in the world," he pronounced, "that's well on the way to meeting the admittedly vague label of 'fascists', surely it's the United States ... We live in a fascist country, 'proto-fascist' if you want to allay public disquiet ... So quit beating up on Europe."
Of Hitchens, he said he was no radical, but "craved to be an insider". Cockburn certainly showed no desire to be a political insider, though at least as a young man he was not wholly immune to the charms of social acceptance. He also called Hitchens a "dauphin of contrariansim", a phrase that applied at least as well to himself.
Cockburn's background was both posh and complex. He was the oldest of the three sons of Claud Cockburn and his third wife, Patricia. Claud worked as a subeditor and foreign correspondent on the Times and became a communist – or at least a leftwing socialist – who fought for the Republic in Spain and from 1933 to 1941 ran the irreverent and influential newsletter the Week.
The Cockburns were Scots lawyers and military men of distinction. Alexander liked to recall that a remote ancestor, Admiral Sir George Cockburn, ordered the burning of Washington in 1814, and his own feelings about the capital ran along similar lines.
In 1947 Claud moved to Ireland, and Alexander was brought up in Youghal, Co Cork. He was educated at Glen- almond college, Perthshire, then studied English at Keble College, Oxford, where he wrote for Cherwell. After a couple of years' freelancing for the Times Literary Supplement, the New Left Review and the New Statesman, he left for the US in 1972, with a parting shot about how reactionary and sclerotic the old country had become. It was not long before he had turned his ready pen to equally sharp criticism of his adopted country. In 2009 he became an American – as opposed to an Irish – citizen.
From 1973 Cockburn wrote a regular column on media, Press Clips, for the Village Voice, and was soon widely admired for the breadth and justice of his coverage of the journalism business. However, in 1983, he was "suspended" by the Voice after reports that he had accepted a fee of $10,000 from an Arab educational foundation. He found a new journalistic home at the venerable left-of-centre magazine, the Nation, where his column was called Beat the Devil, after one of his father's novels.
In 1994 he and a colleague, Jeffrey St Clair, joined forces with the Washington investigative reporter Ken Silverstein in founding CounterPunch, with which they set out to do the best investigative journalism in the country. Two years later, they parted company with Silverstein, and soon Cockburn moved to northern California to edit the magazine from there.
Cockburn was sometimes typecast as a leftwing journalist, but in fact his positions were complex, individual and unpredictable. For example, he shared the scepticism of many conservatives about global warming and climate change. He criticised the German government for legislating against Scientology. Nonetheless, he was a consistent and passionate critic of American policies in the Middle East, and opposed intervention in Iraq long before the Iraq war began.
Perhaps his most controversial battles were over antisemitism. Cockburn always denied that he was an antisemite: his point was that Israel and its defenders were quick to accuse anyone who criticised Israeli policy of antisemitism. In response to the accusation of antisemitism by the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, he edited a collection of essays, The Politics of Antisemitism (2003), to which he contributed an essay called My Life As an "Antisemite". One could always tell when Israel was behaving badly, he wrote, because of the accusations of antisemitism hurled at its critics.
From 1968 to 1973 Cockburn was married to the novelist Emma Tennant, and they had a daughter, Daisy. She survives him, as do his brothers, Andrew and Patrick, both journalists.
Alexander Cockburn, journalist, born 6 June 1941; died 21 July 2012