Robert Scheer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Robert Scheer, (b. 1936) is an American journalist who writes a nationally syndicated op-ed column for the San Francisco Chronicle from a left perspective. He teaches communications as a professor at the University of Southern California and edits the online magazine Truthdig.
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[edit] Beginnings through Vietnam
Scheer was born in 1936 to immigrant parents. His mother, a Russian Jew and his father, a German, both worked in the garment industry. After graduating from City College of New York with a degree in economics, he studied as a fellow at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, and then did further economics graduate work at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley. Scheer has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale University, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford, the same post once held by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
After spending time in San Francisco working at City Lights Books and co-authoring an academic book on Cuba, he moved into journalism. Between 1964 and 1969, he was, variously, the Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts Magazine. He 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, Fidel Castro personally gave Scheer the diaries of Che Guevara for publication in Ramparts.
During this period Scheer made a bid for elective office as one of the first anti-Vietnam War candidates. He challenged U.S. Rep Jeffrey Cohelan in the Democratic Primary in 1966. Cohelan was a liberal, but like most Democratic officeholders at that time, he supported the Vietnam War. Scheer lost, but won 40% of the vote (and carried Berkeley), a strong showing against an incumbent that demonstrated the rising strength of New Left Sixties radicalism.
In July of 1970, Scheer accompanied as a journalist a Black Panther Party delegation, led by Eldridge Cleaver to North Korea, China and Vietnam. The delegation also contained the San Francisco Red Guard, Women’s Liberation, the Peace and Freedom Party, Newsreel, and the Movement for a Democratic Military to. The purpose of the delegation was to "express solidarity with the struggles of the Korean" and to "bring back to Babylon information about their communist society and their fight against U.S. imperialism," according to the Black Panther's publication.[1]
[edit] After Vietnam
After decades freelancing for magazines including the New Times and Playboy from 1976 to 1993, he joined the Los Angeles Times, where he met his wife Narda Zacchino, a reporter at the paper. He wrote articles and series on such diverse topics as the Soviet Union during glasnost, the Jews of Los Angeles, arms control, urban crises, national politics and the military, as well as covering several presidential elections.
His op-ed column, which ran every Tuesday in the Times for 12 years, now appears first in the San Francisco Chronicle and is syndicated nationally by Creators Syndicate. He is also a contributing editor for The Nation magazine.
Scheer can be heard weekly on the nationally syndicated political analysis radio program "Left, Right & Center" produced at KCRW and syndicated by Public Radio International.
Scheer has interviewed every president from Richard Nixon on through Bill Clinton. He conducted the famous 1976 Playboy interview with Jimmy Carter, in which the then-presidential candidate admitted to have lusted in his heart. In an interview with George H.W. Bush, the future president and then presidential candidate revealed that he believed nuclear war was "winnable." Scheer has profiled politicians from Jerry Brown to Willie Brown, from Henry Kissinger to Zbigniew Brzezinski as well as entertainment figures such as Tom Cruise.
Scheer has written seven 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 and made it to the Los Angeles Times Bestseller List. It was co-authored by his oldest son Christopher Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry, senior editor at Alternet.
His latest book is 2006's Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton - and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush.
He has also taught courses at Antioch College in San Francisco, New York City College, UC Irvine, UCLA and UC Berkeley. He is now a Senior Lecturer at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, where he teaches two courses each semester on media and society.
Scheer was the 1998 honoree of the Shelter Partnership, an organization of Los Angeles downtown businesses, and the USC School of Social Work's Los Amigos award recipient. 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 Wen Ho Lee. He has also received awards and citations from Stanford University, the Moscow Academy of Sciences, the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University.
Scheer was a creative script consultant on the Oliver Stone film, Nixon which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He has appeared in small speaking roles as a journalist in several feature films, including The Siege and Bulworth. In 2005, a documentary on the activist and philanthropist Stanley Sheinbaum that Scheer co-produced premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival.
[edit] "My pen sharper and my words tougher"
After running his column for more than 12 years, the Los Angeles Times fired Scheer in November 2005 as part of a revamp of their opinion-editorial page that also saw the firing of their conservative editorial cartoonist, Michael Ramirez. Scheer said in an interview with "Democracy Now!" that the paper's owner, the Tribune Company, currently owns a newspaper and a television station in the same market, which is illegal[citation needed], and may have fired Scheer in an attempt to make it easier to obtain a waiver permitting the dual ownership from the FCC. An estimated 300 people protested Scheer's firing outside the Times downtown office, and many readers publicly announced the cancellation of their subscriptions to the Times, including Barbra Streisand.
In a posting at the Huffington Post, 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 sixty 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."
Within a few days of his column being retired by the Times, the San Francisco Chronicle offered itself as the new home paper of Scheer's syndicated column, which now runs on Wednesdays there and elsewhere. On November 29, 2005, he launched a new online magazine called Truthdig.
