[5] His mother, Ida Kuran,[6] was a Russian Jew, and his father, Frederick Scheer, was a Protestant native of Germany;[7] both worked in the garment industry.

[9] In 1962[10] in Berkeley, California, Scheer along with David Horowitz, Maurice Zeitlin, Phil Roos, and Sol Stern founded Root and Branch: A Radical Quarterly, one of the earliest campus New Left journals.

[11][12] While working at City Lights Books in San Francisco, Scheer co-authored Cuba, an American Tragedy (1964) with Maurice Zeitlin.

[13] Scheer 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.

After Ramparts collapsed, Scheer became a freelance writer who was published in major magazines including Playboy, Look, Esquire, Lear's and Cosmopolitan.

[14] Scheer lost, but won over 45% of the vote (and carried Berkeley), a strong enough showing against an incumbent to represent an indicator of the strength of New Left Sixties radicalism.

[15] In July 1970, Scheer accompanied as a journalist a Black Panther Party delegation, led by Eldridge Cleaver, who also wrote for Ramparts, to North Korea, China, and Vietnam.

After Scheer left the LA Times in 1993, the paper granted him a weekly op-ed column which ran every Tuesday for the next 12 years until it was canceled in 2005.

In an August 6, 2002 article, he wrote that "a consensus of experts" informed the Senate that the Iraqi weapons arsenal was "almost totally destroyed during eight years of inspections."

[19] In an April 7, 2010 article, he wrote that Harry Truman perpetrated "the most atrocious act of terrorism in world history when he annihilated the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki".

In a February 15, 2005 LA Times article entitled "What We Don't Know About 9/11 Hurts Us", he stated: "Would George W. Bush have been reelected president if the public understood how much responsibility his administration bears for allowing the 9/11 attacks to succeed?

that the paper's owner, the Tribune Company, owns a newspaper and a television station in the same market, which is illegal,[26][27] and may have fired Scheer in an attempt to make it easier to obtain a waiver permitting the dual ownership from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

In a 2014 Los Angeles Magazine feature about Truthdig, Ed Leibowitz writes, "The columnists and bloggers [of Truthdig] chart an ecosystem in irreversible decline, follow human rights crises and repression overseas, and probe the erosion of American democracy by perpetual war, the disappearance of privacy rights, the abandonment of the poor, and a political system in thrall to corporate titans, gross polluters, and Wall Street crooks.

By pursuing these subjects with an intellectual rigor and relentlessness seldom found on the Web, Truthdig has become one of the most critically acclaimed Internet-based news sites in the world.

[29] Among the site's most covered stories was an atheist manifesto by writer Sam Harris and a searing birthday tribute to slain U.S. Army Ranger and former NFL star Pat Tillman, written by his brother, Kevin.

[1][31] In March 2020, a dispute between Scheer and Truthdig's CEO and publisher, Zuade Kaufman, led to a work stoppage by employees who were subsequently fired.

He won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for his writing in the Los Angeles Times and The Nation about the case of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee.

Publishers Weekly wrote about the latter book saying that it "proves that, when it comes to the ruling sway of money power, Democrats and Republicans, Wall Street and Washington make very agreeable bedfellows."

The book made the Los Angeles Times bestseller list[43] and on October 17, 2010, was reviewed in the same paper by Jonathan Kirsch, who wrote 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.

Scheer and his son were creative script consultants on the Oliver Stone film Nixon, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay.