Award-winning journalist and author Marc Cooper has written about politics and culture from across the country and around the world for more than three decades. He has covered rebellion, revolution and war from venues ranging from Egypt, Lebanon, and South Africa, to South and Central America, to Western and Eastern Europe. Cooper has also done extensive writing about American politics and has reported on several presidential campaigns.
His articles, interviews, and essays have appeared in dozens of publications ranging from
The Atlantic,
Harper’s and the
Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine to
Rolling Stone and
Playboy. He has produced and reported broadcast documentaries for the
Christian Science Monitor, PBS Frontline, CBS News and public radio in the U.S. and Canada. From 1995-2005 he was executive producer and host of the weekly, syndicated
Radio Nation. He currently serves as contributing editor to
The Nation, as columnist for
L.A. Weekly, and as a frequent contributor to
The Atlantic. He also works as Special Correspondent for The Huffington Post (
www.huffingtonpost.com) and is editorial director of its Campaign ’08 Off The Bus project (
www.offthebus.net).
Cooper’s career in journalism began by accident when he published an underground student newspaper while attending the Los Angeles-area Fairfax High School in the late 1960’s. At age 20 he went to work for the Presidential Press and Information Office in Santiago, Chile and served as translator to former President Salvador Allende until the time of the 1973 military coup.
His memoir of that period,
Pinochet and Me, was published in 2001 and was a
Los Angeles Times best-seller. He has published two other non-fiction books:
Roll Over Che Guevara, and
The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas.Cooper has won several journalism prizes over his career including a Major Armstrong Award for reporting on Central America. The Greater Los Angeles Press Club named him Year 2000 Journalist of the Year.
Before his appointment as an Annenberg Lecturer in 2006 and as Visiting Professsor in 2006, he was an adjunct professor of journalism since 2001, teaching undergraduate and graduate news writing and reporting. In 2002, Cooper was named a criminal justice fellow at the USC Annenberg
Institute for Justice and Journalism. A year later he was named IJJ’s Senior Fellow for Border Justice. In 2006 he was appointed as Associate Director of IJJ. As part of his IJJ duties, he edits the Institute’s
"Just News" blog.
Cooper is also a fellow at the USC-based Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities and is an active member of the Pacific Council for International Policy. He’s also an emeritus member of the Writers Guild of America West and is a former national executive board member and Vice-President for Organizing of the National Writers Union.
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