10 March 2011 (Update) - Both Robert Scheer and the New York City-based magazine City Limits have been named the shared winners of the third annual Izzy Award for Special Achievement in Independent Media. The Izzy Award is named after legendary maverick journalist I.F. Stone, who launched I.F. Stone’s Weekly in 1953 and exposed government deception, McCarthyism and racial bigotry. The Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College in New York cited Scheer for being "a beacon of journalistic independence who exposes both major parties on issues foreign and domestic, while giving voice to the disenfranchised," and City Limits for providing "a model of in-depth urban journalism that examines systemic problems, challenges assumptions and points toward solutions."

Robert Scheer speaks here with Claudia Cragg about his latest book, The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books), was released on September 7, 2010. Publishers Weekly wrote that the book "proves that, when it comes to the ruling sway of money power, Democrats and Republicans, Wall Street and Washington make very agreeable bedfellows.” 

Born in 1936, Scheer is an American journalist who writes a column for, and is Editor in Chief of,  Truthdig, an online publication. His column is nationally syndicated throughout the US in publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle and The Nation. He teaches communications as a professor at the University of Southern California.

While working at City Lights Books in San Francisco, Scheer co-authored the book, Cuba, an American tragedy (1964), with Maurice Zeitlin. Between 1964 and 1969, he served, variously, as the Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor-in-chief of Ramparts magazine. He reported from Cambodia, China, North Korea, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East (including the Six-Day War), as well as on national security matters in the United States. While in Cuba, where he interviewed Fidel Castro, Scheer obtained an introduction by the Cuban leader for the diary of Che Guevara — which Scheer had already obtained, with the assistance of French journalist Michele Ray, for publication in Ramparts and by Bantam Books.

During this period Scheer made a bid for elective office as one of the first anti-Vietnam War candidates. He challenged U.S. Representative Jeffrey Cohelan in the 1966 Democratic primary. Cohelan was a liberal, but like most Democratic officeholders at that time, he supported the Vietnam War. Scheer lost, but won over 45% of the vote (and carried Berkeley), a strong showing against an incumbent that demonstrated the rising strength of New Left Sixties radicalism.

After several years freelancing for magazines, including New Times and Playboy, Scheer joined the Los Angeles Times in 1976 as a reporter. There he met Narda Zacchino, a reporter whom he later wed in the paper's news room. As a national correspondent for 17 years at the Times, he wrote articles and series on such diverse topics as the Soviet Union during glasnost, the Jews of Los Angeles, arms control, urban crises, national politics and the military, as well as covering several presidential elections. The Times entered Scheer's work for the Pulitzer Prize 11 times, and he was a finalist for the Pulitzer national reporting award for a series on the television industry.

Scheer has interviewed every president from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton. He conducted the noted 1976 Playboy interview with Jimmy Carter, in which the then-presidential candidate admitted to having "lusted" in his heart.^[2] In an interview with George H.W. Bush, the future president and then presidential candidate revealed that he believed nuclear war was "winnable." Scheer has profiled politicians from Californians Jerry Brown and Willie Brown to Washington insiders like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as entertainment figures like actor Tom Cruise.

Scheer has written eight other books, including a collection entitled Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, and America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals. In 2004, Scheer published The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq and made it to the Los Angeles Times Bestseller List. It was co-authored by his oldest son, Christopher Scheer, and Lakshmi Chaudhry, senior editor at Alternet.

In 2006 Scheer published Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton – and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush; in 2008 he published The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.

(Apart from being made universally available, free, in this podcast, many of these interviews are conducted for and are broadcast on KGNU Denver-Boulder. This is a public radio station, like all public radio stations in these hard economic times, in need of listener funding and support. Kindly consider making a donation to KGNU, however small, to the station (NOT to Claudia Cragg) to continue to make air broadcast  of this work possible).

David Plouffe, author of 'Audacity To Win' (Penguin) is the American political strategist best known as the chief campaign manager for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign in the United States. A long-time Democratic Party campaign consultant, he is a partner with David Axelrod at the party-aligned campaign consulting firm AKP&D Message and Media, which he joined in 2000. "Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory, has recently come out in paperback and in this interview Plouffe discusses the management strategies that he used in the 2008 campaign. He initally issued a video challenge for Obama supporters to buy a copy of his book on December 8, 2009 in order to "Beat Sarah Palin" and her best-selling book for one day.

Plouffe, who talks here with Claudia Cragg, is credited with the campaign's successful overall strategy in the race (primarily against Senator Hillary Clinton) for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, to focus on the first caucus in Iowa and on maximizing the number of pledged delegates, as opposed to focusing on states with primaries and the overall popular vote. He is also credited by The New Republic for Obama's success in the Iowa caucus and for crafting an overall strategy to prolong the primary past Super Tuesday. The Chicago Tribune writes, "Plouffe was the mastermind behind a winning strategy that looked well past Super Tuesday's contests on Feb. 5 and placed value on large and small states.^" Plouffe also maintained discipline over communications in the campaign, including controlling leaks and releasing information about the campaign on its terms. Averse to publicity himself, Plouffe's control over the internal workings of the Obama campaign successfully avoided the publicly aired squabbles that frequently trouble other campaigns.

In May, 2008, David Axelrod praised Plouffe, stating he had "done the most magnificent job of managing a campaign that I've seen in my life of watching presidential politics. To start something like this from scratch and build what we have built was a truly remarkable thing." After winning the election on November 4, Obama credited Plouffe in his acceptance speech, calling him "the unsung hero of this campaign, who built the . . . best political campaign, I think, in the history of the United States of America.

Plouffe is currently working as an outside senior adviser to the Obama administration. He also signed with the Washington Speakers Bureau to give paid speeches and plans to engage in non-government consulting work. In May 2009, Plouffe delivered the Convocation address at Cornell University. In January, President Obama asked Plouffe to “give some extra time” to focus on the mid-term Congressional elections in November 2010.

(Apart from being made universally available, free, in this podcast, many of these interviews are conducted for and are broadcast on KGNU Denver-Boulder. This is a public radio station, like all public radio stations in these hard economic times, in need of listener funding and support. Kindly consider making a donation to KGNU, however small, to the station (NOT to Claudia Cragg) to continue to make air broadcast  of this work possible).

Scott Spencer is an author of many novels who has worked as a journalist publishing in the The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harpers Magazine, GQ, O, The Oprah Magazine, and he is a regular contributor to Rolling Stone. He has taught at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, Williams College and The Bard Prison Project. He is an alumnus of Roosevelt University and in 2004 was the recipient of a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship. For the past twenty years, he has lived in a small town in the Hudson Valley in Upstate New York.

Spencer's best known novels are probably 'Endless Love' and 'A Ship Made of Paper. Both were nominated in the States for the National Book Award and the first sold more than two million copies and was made into a movie in 1981 by director Franco Zeffirelli. 'Waking The Dead' was also made into a film in 2000 produced by Jodie Foster and directed by Keith Gordon. *

Of 'A Ship Made of Paper', fellow writer Joyce Carol Oates gushed "Like Cheever, Spencer has imagined for his... infatuated lover melodramatic crises that verge on the surreal; like John Updike, Spencer is a poet-celebrant of Eros, lyrically precise in his descriptions of lovers' fantasies, lovers' lovemaking, lovers' bodies..."

The Wall Street Journal has written of Scott Spencer that "There are few novelists alive who use the English language as Spencer does... Every ache of feeling, every failed effort at restraint, every attempt at self-deception is captured in precise, beautifully cadenced prose."

* (n.b. Spencer's novel 'Men in Black' is not connected in any way with the Men in Black movies of that name).