Robert Scheer
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ROBERT SCHEER is the editor of TruthDig. A journalist with over 30 years experience, Scheer has built his reputation on the strength of his social and political writing. His columns have appeared in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines.

Scheer draws upon a wealth of experience and knowledge. Between 1964 and 1969, he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993, he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, where he wrote articles on such diverse topics as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military. He is currently a contributing editor at The Times, as well as a contributing editor for The Nation magazine.

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.

Scheer 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 a course on media and society.

Scheer also directs the Privacy Project at the Annenberg School. On Tuesday afternoons, Scheer can be heard on the political radio program "Left, Right and Center" on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica.

An accomplished author, Scheer has written six books including "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."

Over the years, Scheer has been honored for his work, including his coverage of the underprivileged and the welfare system. Recently, he 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 has also received awards and citations from Stanford University, the Moscow Academy of Sciences, UC San Diego and Yale University.

Scheer was raised in the Bronx where he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He studied as a Maxwell Fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

Blog Entries by Robert Scheer

Hope Burning

(148) Comments | Posted May 31, 2012 | 4:08 AM

So now we have Rambo Obama, a steely warrior who, according to a lengthy leaked insider account in the New York Times, hurls death-dealing drones at anyone who threatens the good old USA. Including children. Those children are presumed guilty by virtue of proximity, and the Times plays...

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Do the Bain Hustle

(88) Comments | Posted May 24, 2012 | 4:12 AM

Obviously Barack Obama was right in criticizing Mitt Romney's stewardship of Bain Capital. How else to evaluate the business experience that Romney has made a central tenet of his campaign?

As Obama put it all too accurately: "My opponent, Governor Romney -- his main calling card for why he thinks...

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Obama Can't Knock the Hustle

(126) Comments | Posted May 17, 2012 | 5:17 AM

How did we end up with such smart scoundrels? Even after it was known that Jamie Dimon's bank blew more than $2 billion on the same suspect derivatives trading that has bankrupted the world's economy, Barack Obama still had praise for the intellect of his political backer and the integrity...

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Hope and Hesitation in Obama's Sudden Conversion

(77) Comments | Posted May 10, 2012 | 8:14 AM

Once again President Barack Obama has come tantalizingly close to being terrific. But his failure of courage on the gay marriage issue, in the end, undermined the point he hoped to make Wednesday. As with his prior rhetorical flashes of principle in denouncing torture, commiserating with the victims of Wall...

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Imitation Outrage: Faking Concern for the Chinese Masses

(28) Comments | Posted May 3, 2012 | 4:05 AM

Let's stop jacking the Chinese around. We do not care a whit now -- nor have we ever cared -- about their human rights or any other aspect of their lives as long as they satiate our unbridled appetites. To pretend otherwise is to deny centuries of exploitative history in...

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Halfway Through the Lost Decade

(119) Comments | Posted April 26, 2012 | 3:33 AM

Does anyone care that the economy is floundering and that we are not getting out of this crisis anytime soon? Housing values are in the cellar, the Fed foresees unemployment remaining unacceptably high for the next three years, and national economic growth is predicted to be, at best, anemic.

...
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For He's a Jolly Good Scoundrel

(54) Comments | Posted April 19, 2012 | 8:33 AM

How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of U.S. homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation's economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences....

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You're on Your Own, Kids

(38) Comments | Posted April 12, 2012 | 4:45 AM

Who will speak for the rights of the unborn now that Rick Santorum is gone from the race? Let me give it a whirl from the perspective of one whose own unwed mother had several abortions before yours truly was permitted to emerge.

My arrival came during the U.S....

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Obama By Default

(654) Comments | Posted April 5, 2012 | 3:50 AM

The Republicans are a sick joke, and their narrow ideological stupidity has left rational voters no choice in the coming presidential election but Barack Obama. With Ron Paul out of it and warmongering hedge fund hustler Mitt Romney the likely Republican nominee, the GOP has defined itself indelibly as the...

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Five Hypocrites and One Bad Plan

(592) Comments | Posted March 29, 2012 | 4:57 AM

The Supreme Court is so full of it. The entire institution, as well as its sanctimonious judges themselves, reeks of a time-honored hypocrisy steeped in the arrogance that justice is served by unaccountable elitism.

My problem is not with the Republicans who dominate the court questioning the obviously flawed...

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Voters Have Two Candidates, No Choice

(592) Comments | Posted March 22, 2012 | 4:51 AM

With Mitt Romney's super-PAC limo now on cruise control to victory at the GOP convention, voters are left with only two reasons to vote against Barack Obama: Either they are desperate to return a white man to the White House or they feel strongly that it is time to break...

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At Last, Some Decency on Wall Street

(149) Comments | Posted March 15, 2012 | 3:10 AM

By the time you read this, the PR hacks of Goldman Sachs will be vigorously pressing their efforts to destroy the reputation of whistleblower Greg Smith, a former Goldman executive director whose exposé in Wednesday's New York Times op-ed page was so devastating that the 143-year-old firm might...

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Dennis Kucinich: Conscience of the Congress

(157) Comments | Posted March 8, 2012 | 3:27 AM

"Dennis will be back, you can count on it; he's on the right side of things." I recall those words from a printer in Cleveland who had rented Dennis Kucinich a room in the back of her plant when that city's former "boy mayor" was living in suddenly reduced circumstances....

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The Ayatollah Is Right About One Thing: Nuclear Weapons Are Sinful

(187) Comments | Posted March 1, 2012 | 2:41 AM

Given my own deep prejudice toward religious zealotry, it has not been difficult for me to accept the conventional American view that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme theocratic ruler of Iran, is a dangerous madman never to be trusted with a nuclear weapon. How then to explain his recent seemingly...

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The Gang That Couldn't Bomb Straight

(339) Comments | Posted February 23, 2012 | 4:16 AM

Here we go again. With the economy showing faint signs of life and their positions on the social issues alienating most moderates, the leading Republican candidates, with the exception of Ron Paul, have returned to the elixir of warmongering to once again sway the gullible masses. The race to the...

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Apple's China Comes Home to Haunt Us

(81) Comments | Posted February 16, 2012 | 2:22 AM

Four decades ago Richard Nixon, a once famously hawkish Republican president, cut a deal with the Communist overlords of China to reshape the world. The result was a transformation of the global economy in ways that we are only now, with the sharp critiques of Apple's China operation, beginning to...

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Elections Are for Suckers

(538) Comments | Posted February 9, 2012 | 3:14 AM

Let's just dip our fingers in purple ink and pose for photos now that voting has the same significance for us as it had for those Iraqis who got conned into thinking they were participating in some grand democratic experiment.

Our own elections, the ones our government has modeled...

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The Democrats Who Unleashed Wall Street and Got Away With It

(444) Comments | Posted February 2, 2012 | 3:52 AM

That Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason.

Yet, there...

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Obama's Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton

(616) Comments | Posted January 26, 2012 | 4:20 AM

I'll admit it: Listening to Barack Obama, I am ready to enlist in his campaign against the feed-the-rich Republicans ... until I recall that I once responded in the same way to Bill Clinton's faux populism. And then I get angry because betrayal by the "good guys" for whom I...

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There's Hope for Republicans

(147) Comments | Posted January 12, 2012 | 11:21 AM

There is a full-blown debate going on in, of all places, the Republican Party about the failings of the governing, corporate-sponsored kleptocracy. Not so on the Democratic side. Spared a primary battle, the incumbent president need not defend his economic record, which is basically a redo of the save-Wall-Street-first stance...

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