Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer
Robert Scheeris an American journalist who writes a column for Truthdig that is nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate in publications such as The Huffington Post and The Nation. He is a clinical professor of communications at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California and co-hosts the weekly political radio program Left, Right & Center on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, California. Scheer is editor-in-chief for the Webby Award-winning online...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth14 April 1936
CountryUnited States of America
A gym is a great source of activities for children. But it can also be a solid operational revenue source. It can be rented out for events, which in turn encourages businesses to sponsor teams, shirts and other activities.
That means presenting the issues in certain ways that will appeal to those people and then becoming a prisoner of your own language and thought process. That has always happened - it's just been intensified.
I've been with the paper for almost 30 years.
So this guy, Jeff Johnson, who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he's a right winger who supported the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn't stand a word that I wrote.
Sometimes Bill O'Reilly would sometimes go after me every day, and this went on for the last couple of years, and I'm still standing.
And the big issue here, I think, is that the publisher took over the editorial pages, a guy named Jeff Johnson. He's an accountant from Chicago, doesn't know anything about what newspapers are supposed to be about, and he made a decision to get rid of the column.
It's not easy to pull off the Big Lie and George Bush has failed.
Well, what happened is that I had been the subject of vicious attacks by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.
The publisher has told - you know, if these editors, Andres Martinez and Nick Goldberg, were the least bit honest about this, they would tell you the publisher has told them he wants the editorial page to be conservative.
What they are interested in at the L.A. Times is profits, and then when it's convenient to them, they wave the flag of free press.
What Clinton severed with his welfare reform was the obligation of the federal government to step in when the states failed and to monitor these programs.
The publisher Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately 60 percent of Americans now get the point but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher.
The death of American liberalism as a significant moral force can be traced to the point in when President Bill Clinton signed legislation that effectively ended the main federal anti-poverty program and turned the fate of welfare recipients, 70 percent of whom were children, over to the tender mercies of the states. With a stroke of the pen, Clinton eliminated what remained of New Deal-era compassion for the poor and codified into law the "tough love" callousness that his Republican allies in the Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, had long embraced.
The fact is ... that when totalitarian nations like China and Saudi Arabia play ball with U.S. business interests, we like them just fine. But when Venezuela's freely elected president threatens powerful corporate interests, the Bush administration treats him as an enemy.