Biography
Michael Isikoff is an award-winning journalist and best-selling author who joined Yahoo News in 2014 as Chief Investigative Correspondent. He previously served as national investigative correspondent for NBC News between 2010 and 2014 and for Newsweek magazine between 1994 and 2010. Isikoff is the author of two New York Times best-selling books: “Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War,” co-written with David Corn, and “Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story,” which chronicled his own reporting of the Monica Lewinsky story. In 2015, he wrote and produced “Uniquely Nasty: The U.S. Government’s War on Gays,” a widely acclaimed documentary about the FBI’s “sex deviates’ program that was awarded the Edward R. Murrow Award for best documentary by the Radio Television Digital News Association.
Isikoff has written extensively on the U.S. government’s war on terrorism, presidential politics and other national issues. At Newsweek.com his blog “DeClassified – Investigative Reporting in Real Time,” written with Mark Hosenball, become a must-read for senior U.S. officials. Their previous web column, “Terror Watch,” also written for Newsweek.com, won the 2005 Society of Professional Journalists award for best investigative reporting online. Isikoff’s exclusive reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal gained him national attention in 1998 and his coverage of the events that lead to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment earned Newsweek the prestigious National Magazine Award in the Reporting category in 1999. Isikoff’s Lewinsky reporting also won the National Headliner Award, the Edgar A. Poe Award presented by the White House Correspondents Association and the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. In 2009, Isikoff was named on a list of the 50 “Best and Most Influential Journalists” in the nation’s capital by Washingtonian magazine. Isikoff also worked at The Washington Post, where he had been a reporter between 1981 and 1994. Isikoff graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a B.A. in 1974 and received a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 1976.