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Robert Scheer (born April 4, 1936) is an American journalist and professor who has written for Ramparts, the Los Angeles Times, Playboy, Hustler Magazine, Truthdig, ScheerPost and other publications as well as having written many books. His column for Truthdig was nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate in publications such as The Huffington Post and The Nation. He is a clinical professor of communications at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. Scheer is the former editor in-chief for the Webby Award-winning online magazine Truthdig. Scheer’s work tends to embrace left-wing politics, and for many years, he co-hosted the nationally syndicated political analysis radio program Left, Right & Center on NPR (NPR), produced at public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica. The Society of Professional Journalists awarded Scheer the 2011 Sigma Delta Chi Award for his column. 2011 Sigma Delta Chi winners
While working at City Lights Books in San Francisco, Scheer co-authored Cuba, an American Tragedy (1964) with Maurice Zeitlin. Between 1964 and 1969, he served, variously, as the Vietnam War correspondent, managing editor, and editor-in-chief of Ramparts magazine in San Francisco. Scheer reported from Cambodia, China, North Korea, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East (including the Six-Day War), as well as on national security matters in the United States. While in Cuba, where he interviewed Fidel Castro, Scheer obtained an introduction by the Cuban leader for the diary of Che Guevara — which Scheer had already obtained, with the help of French journalist Michele Ray, for publication in Ramparts and by Bantam Books. After Ramparts collapsed, Scheer became a freelance writer who was published in major magazines including Playboy, Look, Esquire, Lear's and Cosmopolitan.
In 1968, Scheer signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse to pay taxes in protest against the Vietnam War."Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" January 30, 1968 New York Post
In July 1970, Scheer accompanied as a journalist a Black Panther Party delegation, led by Eldridge Cleaver, who also wrote for Ramparts, to North Korea, China, and Vietnam. The delegation also included people from the San Francisco Red Guard, the women's liberation movement, the Peace and Freedom Party, Newsreel, and the Movement for a Democratic Military.
In the November 1970 California elections, Scheer ran for the U.S. Senate as the nominee of the Peace and Freedom Party against Republican senator George Murphy and Democratic Congressman John V. Tunney. Scheer received 56,731 votes and lost the election to Tunney.
After Scheer left the LA Times in 1993, the paper granted him a weekly op-ed column which ran every Tuesday for the next 12 years until it was canceled in 2005. The column now appears in Truthdig and is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate. Scheer is also a contributing editor for The Nation magazine. He was heard weekly on the nationally syndicated political analysis radio program Left, Right & Center, produced at and syndicated by public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica, and is a host of Scheer Intelligence, a half-hour KCRW podcast with politically engaged individuals.
Scheer has taught courses at Antioch College, City College of New York, UC Irvine, UCLA and UC Berkeley, and is now a clinical professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, where he teaches two courses each semester on media and society.
Scheer interviewed every president from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton. He conducted the 1976 Playboy interview with Jimmy Carter, in which the then-presidential candidate admitted to having "lusted" in his heart. In an interview with George H. W. Bush in 1980, the then presidential candidate revealed that he believed nuclear war was "winnable", which was believed to have contributed to his primary loss to Ronald Reagan.
Scheer has profiled politicians from Californians Jerry Brown and Willie Brown to Washington insiders like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. He has also reviewed films such as Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July and interviewed actors and artists including Tom Cruise, Barbara Williams, Mike Farrell and Willie Nelson.
What happened is that I had been the subject of vicious attacks by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. ... I was a punching bag for those guys. I'm still standing, and the people who run the paper collapsed.
In a posting on HuffPost, Scheer wrote:
The publisher Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately 60 percent of Americans now get the point but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher.
Scheer's firing incited a protest held outside the LA Times downtown office on November 15, and hundreds of readers wrote letters of complaint while some, including Barbra Streisand, publicly announced the cancellation of their LA Times subscriptions.
Within a few days of his column being retired by the Times, Scheer accepted an offer from the San Francisco Chronicle which went on to publish his column for three years.
The columnists and bloggers of chart an ecosystem in irreversible decline, follow human rights crises and repression overseas, and probe the erosion of American democracy by perpetual war, the disappearance of privacy rights, the abandonment of the poor, and a political system in thrall to corporate titans, gross polluters, and Wall Street crooks. By pursuing these subjects with an intellectual rigor and relentlessness seldom found on the Web, Truthdig has become one of the most critically acclaimed Internet-based news sites in the world.http://www.lamag.com/features/2014/2/25/can-you-dig-it-yes-you-can/print|date=November 2020}}Among the site's most covered stories was an atheist manifesto by writer Sam Harris and a searing birthday tribute to slain U.S. Army Ranger and former NFL star Pat Tillman, written by his brother, Kevin.
Truthdig is a four-time recipient of the Webby Award for best political blog, and in 2013, Truthdig won a fifth award for best political site. Truthdig is a winner of multiple awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Los Angeles Press Club.
In March 2020, a dispute between Scheer and Truthdig's CEO and publisher, Zuade Kaufman, led to a work stoppage by employees who were subsequently fired. In November 2022, after almost two years on "hiatus", the website relaunched without Scheer's involvement. After leaving Truthdig, Scheer launched the website ScheerPost.
Scheer was the 1998 honoree of the Shelter Partnership, an organization of Los Angeles downtown businesses as well as the recipient of the USC School of Social Work's Los Amigos Award. He won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for his writing in the Los Angeles Times and The Nation about the case of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. He has also received awards and citations from Stanford University, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University.
Robert Scheer is now married to Narda Catharine Zacchino. She worked at the Los Angeles Times for 31 years, where she became the associate editor and a vice president.
She was later deputy editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. Zacchino is the co-author of three books and is a senior fellow at USC's Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy.
Robert Scheer is a journalist in the social gadfly tradition of Lincoln Steffens, I. F. Stone and Seymour Hersh. His latest book, The Great American Stickup, blames the 'captains of finance' for causing the 2008 'meltdown' of the global economy in the first place and then profiting from the tax dollars that were thrown at the problem — 'a giant hustle that served the richest of the rich,' as he puts it, 'and left the rest of us holding the bag.'Scheer has written eight other books, including a collection entitled Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power; With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War; and America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals. In 2004, Scheer published The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq, which became a Los Angeles Times Bestseller. It was co-authored by his oldest son, Christopher Scheer, and Lakshmi Chaudhry, senior editor at Alternet.
Scheer's anthology Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton – and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush (Akashic Books, 2006), is a collection of his many interviews, profiles, and columns about Presidents Richard Nixon through George W. Bush. The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America was published in 2008.
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