Robert Scheer

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Robert Scheer (born April 14, 1936 in New York City ) is an American journalist and university lecturer (journalism). He is editor of the award-winning online magazine Truthdig .

Life

Scheer is the son of German-Russian immigrants and grew up in the Bronx. His mother, Ida Kuran, was a Russian Jew, his father, Frederick Scheer, a Protestant who had emigrated from Germany. Both parents worked in the textile industry. He studied economics at City College of New York , Syracuse University, and University of California, Berkeley (Center for Chinese Studies). He then worked in the book trade and publishing industry (City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco ).

Journalistic career

In 1969 he was replaced as editor-in-chief by Ramparts, which despite its widespread use had to officially declare bankruptcy and was re-established in Berkeley under David Horowitz and Peter Collier.

In 1970 he accompanied a delegation of the Black Panthers under Eldridge Cleaver to North Korea , China and Vietnam as a journalist.

After working as a freelance journalist for the New Times and Playboy , among others , he was a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times from 1976 . Among other things, he reported on the glasnost era of the Soviet Union and the US presidential elections and regularly interviewed US presidents and presidential candidates (for example, Jimmy Carter in Playboy in 1976 ). Even after he left in 1993, he had a weekly column there until 2005, which was then continued on the San Francisco Chronicle and in The Nation , where he is co-editor.

The LA Times announced him in 2005. According to Scheer, this was the result of political differences as a result of an article by Scheer in his column, in which he gave George W. Bush joint responsibility for the failure to heed warnings in the run-up to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 .

The newspaper had given savings reasons as a reason for resignation, but later filled his position with two conservative columnists. Scheer said in an interview with Democracy Now! , the owner of the Los Angeles Times, the Tribune Company , illegally owns a newspaper and a television station in the same market, and may have fired him to make it easier for him to get permission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In a letter to the Huffington Post , Scheer wrote that Los Angeles Times editor Jeff Johnson privately told others that he hated every word he wrote. Scheer suspected this was referring to his portrayal of President Bush's lies to justify the Iraq war.

The dismissal led to demonstrations in front of the LAT buildings and some cancellations of subscriptions, including Barbra Streisand , who made this public. Within a few weeks, the San Francisco Chronicle offered itself for the continuation of Scheer's column, which was continued there for three years.

Scheer moderates the weekly political radio program Left, Right and Center on the radio station KCRW. He is also the editor of the online magazine Truthdig .

Positions

Iraq war

On August 6, 2002, Scheer wrote "a consensus of experts" had informed the Senate that Iraq's arsenal had been almost completely destroyed within the eight-year inspection. On June 3, 2003 Scheer concluded that the White House's justifications for the war effort were a "big lie."

Hiroshima

On April 7, 2010, he wrote that Harry Truman committed the most terrible act of terrorism in world history when he wiped out the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He repeated this statement on his radio program Left, Right & Center .

Candidate for Congress

As an opponent of the Vietnam War, he ran in the Democratic Party's primary elections for the 1966 House of Representatives in California against incumbent Jeffery Cohelan (who was for the Vietnam War), but was defeated, but received 45% of the vote and won in Berkeley. The results showed the growing influence of the left in the US as a result of the protest movement against the Vietnam War, particularly in California. Scheer was then put up as a candidate for the left-wing pacifist Peace and Freedom Party for election to the US Senate in 1970 , but did not get more than 0.87 percent of the vote.

University professor

He has taught at the City College of New York, UCLA and the University of Berkeley , among others, and currently teaches journalism at the University of Southern California . He was a Poynter Fellow at Yale University and a Fellow in Arms Control at Stanford University . With his son Christopher Scheer he was a consultant for the film Nixon by Oliver Stone .

Publications

In 1964 he published his first book, Cuba - an American Tragedy with Maurice Zeitlin. He then worked as a Vietnam War and foreign correspondent and then editor of Ramparts magazine , which was then known for its left investigative journalism. Among other things, he reported on the Six Day War , uncovered the collaboration between the Michigan State University Advisory Group and the CIA in its advisory work in Vietnam in the 1950s and published Che Guevara's diary , which he was also able to see in Cuba himself on the occasion of an interview with Fidel Castro .

Prizes and awards

  • Four times the Truhdig website received the Webby Award for the best political blog
  • 2013 Webby Award for best political website
  • 2010 Distinguished Work in New Media Award from the Society of Professional Journalists
  • 2011 Izzy Award for excellence in independent media
  • USC School of Social Work's Los Amigos Award.
  • James Aronson Award

Private

He is a second married to journalist Narda Zacchino, the former co-editor and vice president of the Los Angeles Times.

Fonts

  • with Maurice Zeitlin: Cuba, tragedy in our hemisphere, New York, Grove Press 1963
  • Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power, New York, Hill and Wang 1988
  • With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, Random House 1982 (with Narda Zacchino, Constance Matthiesson)
  • What happened - the story of election 1980, Random House 1981
  • America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals, McGraw Hill 1974
  • with Christopher Scheer, Lakshmi Chaudhry: The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq, New York, Akashic Books 2004
  • Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton - and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush, Los Angeles, Truth Dig, New York, Akashic Books, 2006
  • The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks hijacked 9/11 and weakened America, New York, Twelve, 2008.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hamm, Theodore : Left on the Inside - Robert Scheer with Theodore Hamm. In The Brooklyn Rail . ISSN 2157-2151 . Born and raised in the Bronx, and a graduate of City College, Scheer is the former editor of Ramparts , a radical magazine of the 1960s.
  2. ^ Robert Scheer: My Mother, the Illegal Alien . May 3, 2006. Retrieved May 25, 2013. 
  3. ↑ Robert Scheer Biography . In: Notable Names Database . Retrieved May 25, 2013.
  4. ^ Peter Richardson: A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America . New Press, September 2009, ISBN 1-59558-439-0 .
  5. ↑ It existed from 1962 to 1975 and its layout served as a template for Rolling Stone magazine , which was founded by Ramparts journalist Jan Wenner
  6. ↑ Founded in Phoenix in 1970 , the newspaper soon expanded to other cities and eventually merged with the Village Voice Group. New Times
  7. ^ Scheer What we do not know about 9/11 hurts us , LA Times, February 15, 2005
  8. ↑ a b c In Fact ... , The Nation . November 17, 2005, p. 8. Retrieved October 29, 2009. 
  9. ↑ FCC Internet Services Staff: Newspaper / Broadcast Cross-Ownership - FCC News . Fcc.gov. Retrieved July 26, 2011.
  10. ^ The FCC's newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule: an analysis - Economic Policy Institute . Epi.org. Retrieved July 26, 2011.
  11. ^ Mariel Garza: Journalists At Loss For Words When Own Ranks Are Slashed , Los Angeles Daily News . December 8, 2005, p. N3. Retrieved October 29, 2009. 
  12. ↑ Streisand cancels LA Times subscription over columnist's firing , USA Today . December 8, 2005. Retrieved October 29, 2009. 
  13. ↑ Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, "LA Times Dumps Liberal Columnist: Scheer out as Bush attacks Iraq War Critics," November 17, 2005 . Fair.org. November 4, 2003. Retrieved July 26, 2011.
  14. ^ Robert Scheer: Earning His Nobel Prize , Huffingtonpost.com. April 7, 2010. Retrieved July 26, 2011. 
  15. ↑ Ourcampaigns.com: Robert Scheer
personal data
SURNAME Scheer, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist
DATE OF BIRTH April 14, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City