Robert Scheer is a prominent American journalist, author, and left-wing commentator born on April 4, 1936, in New York City. Raised in the Bronx, he attended public schools and graduated from the City College of New York. He pursued further studies as a Maxwell Fellow at Syracuse University and conducted graduate work in economics as a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has also held fellowships including a Poynter fellowship at Yale and a fellowship in arms control at Stanford. His early career included serving as Vietnam correspondent, managing editor, and editor-in-chief of Ramparts magazine from 1964 to 1969, where he gained recognition for his investigative reporting. From 1976 to 1993, Scheer worked as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, covering topics such as the Soviet Union and national politics. He is known for his work on foreign policy and civil rights. He has contributed to numerous publications including Playboy, Hustler Magazine, Truthdig, and ScheerPost, and his columns were nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate in outlets like The Huffington Post and The Nation. Scheer is the author of several books and co-hosted the NPR political analysis program Left, Right & Center, produced by KCRW in Santa Monica. In academia, he serves as a clinical professor of communications at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and was the editor-in-chief of the Webby Award-winning online magazine Truthdig. His work is characterized by a left-wing perspective, earning him the 2011 Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for his column. He has appeared in films such as Bulworth (1998), The Siege (1998), and Nixon (1995) as an actor and writer, further extending his influence in media and public discourse.