Robert Scheer Biography Quotes 25 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Robert Scheer, born in 1936, emerged from a working-class New York upbringing with a fascination for politics, economics, and the press. He studied at City College of New York and pursued graduate work in economics, earning a master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley. That grounding in political economy informed his later reporting, which repeatedly interrogated power, war, and the market forces that shape American life. The habits he developed as a student economist would become hallmarks of his journalism: an insistence on data, a nose for policy consequences, and a willingness to challenge official narratives.

Ramparts and the Vietnam Era
Scheer became a central figure at Ramparts magazine, the groundbreaking San Francisco-based publication that helped redefine investigative journalism in the 1960s. As an editor and reporter, he worked alongside audacious colleagues such as Warren Hinckle, David Horowitz, Peter Collier, and art director Dugald Stermer. Their collective work dug into the Vietnam War, covert operations, and the intersection of politics and culture at a moment when old certainties were cracking. Scheer reported from Southeast Asia and became known for probing analyses of the war's origins and conduct. He was part of the Ramparts team culture that exposed secret government funding of student and cultural groups, a revelation that shook Washington and underscored the magazine's influence. In 1966, he carried his antiwar convictions into electoral politics by challenging incumbent Jeffery Cohelan in a Democratic congressional primary based in the Berkeley-Oakland area, a race that highlighted the growing divide in the party over Vietnam and foreshadowed the insurgent campaign that later brought Ronald Dellums to Congress.

National Profile and Interviews with Power
After the Ramparts years, Scheer moved into mainstream newspapers and national magazines while maintaining his adversarial posture toward officialdom. He became a national correspondent and later a columnist at the Los Angeles Times, one of the most prominent platforms in American journalism. He interviewed, scrutinized, and wrote about the people who shaped U.S. policy, including presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. His Playboy interview with Jimmy Carter became an enduring cultural moment, remembered for the future president's remarks about religious faith, human frailty, and the moral demands of public life. Across print and broadcast work, Scheer's voice remained recognizably his own: skeptical of ideologues, attentive to the poor and marginalized, and impatient with euphemisms that obscure the costs of war and deregulation.

Books and Big Arguments
Scheer's books amplified the themes of his reportage. With Enough Shovels dissected nuclear policy during the Reagan and Bush years; Playing President gathered his encounters with modern American leaders; The Pornography of Power examined the post-9/11 national security state; The Great American Stickup charted how deregulatory zeal and bipartisan financial engineering paved the way for the 2008 crisis; and They Know Everything About You explored the convergence of corporate data collection and government surveillance. Earlier in his career he wrote on Cuba and on U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, staking an early claim as a reporter who blended fieldwork with economic and historical analysis. He also collaborated closely with family and colleagues: with his son Christopher Scheer and journalist Lakshmi Chaudhry, he co-authored The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq, a brisk, pointed critique of the arguments sold to the public in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.

Radio, Debate, and the Public Square
Scheer became widely known to radio audiences through KCRW's Left, Right & Center, where he sparred for years with host Matt Miller and fellow panelists such as Arianna Huffington and Tony Blankley. The program's civil, persistent debate showcased Scheer's willingness to directly engage ideological opponents without abandoning his commitments. Later, he launched Scheer Intelligence, an interview program that brought long-form conversations with historians, journalists, artists, and dissidents, including figures like Daniel Ellsberg. The show continued his habit of interrogating the architecture of power while making room for complicated, personal narratives.

Truthdig and the Digital Turn
In the mid-2000s Scheer co-founded the news and commentary site Truthdig with publisher Zuade Kaufman, assembling a roster of contributors whose work traveled widely across the emerging digital public square. The site became a home for incisive essays and investigations by writers including Chris Hedges, Bill Boyarsky, and Juan Cole, and it won multiple Webby Awards as it found a global audience. Truthdig helped sustain a tradition of progressive muckraking as newspapers retrenched and new media rose, and its coverage frequently returned to themes that defined Scheer's career: endless war, financialization, civil liberties, and the gap between American ideals and policy reality.

Teaching and Mentorship
Scheer's professional life also unfolded in the classroom. He taught for many years at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he was known for frank conversations about ethics, political economy, and the changing business of news. Students encountered an instructor who demanded rigor and who treated journalism as a public trust. Many of his mentees went on to newsroom roles across the country, carrying forward his insistence that context, history, and skepticism belong in every serious story.

Personal Ties and Collaborators
Throughout his career, Scheer's closest collaborators grounded his work in a community of editors, reporters, and family members. His partner, editor Narda Zacchino, brought her own newsroom experience at the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle to their life together, offering a seasoned perspective on the craft and its institutions. At Ramparts he worked in an environment shaped by Warren Hinckle's swaggering editorial style and by the intellectual energy of colleagues like David Horowitz and Peter Collier. At Truthdig he relied on the partnership of Zuade Kaufman and the labors of contributors such as Chris Hedges and Bill Boyarsky. On the air he argued and joked with Matt Miller, Arianna Huffington, and Tony Blankley, modeling a combative but civil conversation across lines of ideology.

Enduring Concerns and Legacy
Across decades and platforms, Scheer's writing pursued a consistent set of questions: Who benefits and who pays when the United States goes to war? How do financial and political elites convert crisis into opportunity? What becomes of liberty and privacy as the state and large corporations accumulate data and influence? By pairing clear prose with an economist's eye for incentives, he made those questions accessible to a broad public. Whether reporting from conflict zones, pressing presidents in interviews, or running a digital newsroom, he built a body of work that invites readers and listeners to measure policy against human outcomes. That stance, sharpened in the crucible of the Vietnam era and carried into the age of surveillance capitalism, defines his place in American journalism.

Our collection contains 25 quotes who is written by Robert, under the main topics: Justice - Leadership - Writing - Freedom - Honesty & Integrity.