Marcel W. "Mike" Fodor (17 January 1890 in Budapest, Hungary - 1 July 1977 in Trostberg, Germany; often cited as M. W. Fodor), was a foreign correspondent for several British and American newspapers in Vienna during the years between the world wars, editor of the Berlin edition of Die Neue Zeitung and correspondent for Voice of America in Europe after World War II, and an author who specialized in the Balkans and Central Europe.

In the revolutions that shook Hungary immediately after World War I, Fodor's parents were named as "class enemies" by the new communist regime and killed.

The Manchester Guardian liked his occasional letters from Middle Europe, asked for cables, soon hired the shy, whip-smart, "relentlessly honest" little man as a fulltime correspondent.

[9]In the 1920s and the 1930s, Fodor worked as a journalist in Central Europe, posting stories with the Guardian; several major newspapers in the United States; and magazines such as The Nation, The New Republic and American Mercury.

[citation needed] Covering the interwar turmoil in Central Europe, Fodor was a friend or mentor to several renowned journalists who covered the same beat, including Dorothy Thompson, John Gunther, Frances Gunther, William Shirer, George Eric Rowe Gedye, H. R. Knickerbocker, Edgar Mowrer, Frederick Scheu, Robert Best and others who frequented the Stammtisch at the Café Louvre, the unofficial headquarters of foreign journalism in interwar Vienna.

[12]Fulbright, who later served as US senator for Arkansas for 30 years and established the US foreign exchange program that bears his name, first met Fodor in Vienna.

In spring 1929, Fulbright, who had just finished his studies at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, joined Fodor on a factfinding trip across several Balkan countries and Greece.

For example, John Gunther, who worked closely with him in Vienna during the early 1930s, wrote that "he has the most acutely comprehensive knowledge of Central Europe of any journalist I know."

[17] In the tense months leading up to World War II, Fodor and his family narrowly escaped Vienna in March 1938, Czechoslovakia in September 1938 and finally Belgium and France in May and June 1940 as Axis forces moved forward across Europe.

[18] From 1940 to 1944, Fodor lived in the United States, working as a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology and as a columnist with the Chicago Sun.