Robert Scheer has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter confessed to the lust in his heart and went on to do interviews for the Los Angeles Times with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and other prominent political and cultural figures.

From 1964–1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor-in-chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976–1993 he served as a national correspondent for the L.A. Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military. In 1993 he launched a nationally syndicated column based at the L.A. Times, where he was named a contributing editor. That column ran weekly for the next 12 years and is now based at truthdig.com, an online magazine that Scheer co-founded, which provides in-depth content on current affairs.

Scheer can be heard on the weekly radio program Left, Right and Center on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica. Scheer has written 10 books, including Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power and With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War.

Scheer was raised in the Bronx, where he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He was Maxwell Fellow at Syracuse University and a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer is a contributing editor for The Nation as well as a Nation Fellow. He has also been a Poynter Fellow at Yale and was a fellow in Stanford’s arms control and disarmament program.