Marc Cooper

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Marc Cooper is an American journalist, author, and blogger. He is currently a contributing editor to The Nation. He also pens the popular "Dissonance" column for LA Weekly. His writing has appeared in such publications as the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, The Christian Science Monitor, Playboy and Rolling Stone. He has also been television producer for PBS, CBS News, and The Christian Science Monitor. His radio reports have aired on NBC, CBC and the BBC.

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[edit] Early Life

Cooper was born in Venice, California and grew up in Los Angeles. His career in journalism began in 1966 when he founded and edited an underground newspaper at Fairfax High School in West Hollywood, California. In 1971, he was expelled from the California State University system for his antiwar activism by order of Governor Ronald Reagan[citation needed].

[edit] In Chile

From 1971 to 1973, Cooper served as the Spanish-English translator for Chilean Socialist president Salvador Allende. Following the military coup of 1973, he fled the country, fearing execution as an Allende cabinet member[citation needed]; some of his American friends were executed by the military, including journalist Charles Horman.

[edit] Radio

From 1980 to 1983, Cooper was the news and public affairs director of Pacifica station KPFK-FM, Los Angeles. He later served as the principal host of the one-hour weekly program, "Radio Nation", a collaborative effort between the Pacifica radio network and The Nation magazine. He also hosted a daily talk show on KPFK between 1998 and 2001, which he quit amid disagreements with the dissident group which gained control of the station's parent Pacifica Foundation.[citation needed]

[edit] Controversial Views

Although Cooper espouses many traditional leftist positions, he also criticizes some of his fellow leftists for what he says is a kneejerk and irrational tendency to support "unworthy" and marginal causes. He astonished many ideological allies by his criticism of Mumia Abu Jamal, whom he famously dismissed as "a bad choice for poster-boy of the anti-death penalty movement."[citation needed] Cooper also disparaged Ward Churchill, calling him a "guaranteed loser" who was "an irrelevant and clearly deranged loner on the edge of the looniest left."[citation needed] Cooper was vocal in his opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation, but he has been scathingly critical of other leftist opponents to the war, such as Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, who he lambasted as a "friend" and "apologist" for prominent Iraqi Shiite Islamist Muqtada al-Sadr in response to a piece she wrote for the September 13, 2004 edition of The Nation.

Cooper has also been harshly critical of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, whom he regards as a "thug," and very supportive of the Ukrainian Orange Revolution, the latter of which some on the Left viewed as an attempt by the U.S. to manipulate the country into the Western sphere of influence.

Over the past few years Cooper has sharply criticized the Cuban government for its crackdown on internal dissidents -- some of whom have been handed stiff sentences for receiving funds and instructions from the United States. Cooper has helped write and circulate international letters of protest defending the locked-up dissidents[citation needed].

Cooper has published three books: Roll Over Che Guevara: Travels of a Radical Reporter (1994), an anthology of his journalistic pieces,Pinochet and Me: A Chilean Anti Memoir (2001) which was an L.A. Times best-seller, and The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas (2004).

[edit] Journalism

In the spring 2006, Cooper was appointed a Visiting Professor of Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication for the academic year 2006-2007. He had taught the previous five years as an adjunct. He was also promoted to the post of Associate Director at Annenberg's Institute for Justice and Journalism. His journalism prizes include awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Armstrong Memorial Foundation, the Sidney Hillman Foundation, the California Associated Press TV and Radio Association, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Best in the West, Project Censored, PEN American Center, and the Greater Los Angeles Press Club.

Since May 2005 he's been a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post. The same year he joined the advisory board of Pajamas Media, a weblog-related company.

He is married to Chilean writer and teacher Patricia Vargas-Cooper and has one adult daughter, Natasha who studies at UCLA while pursuing a career with the Service Employees International Union as a health-care organizer.

[edit] External links

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