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David Talbot

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David Talbot, born and raised in Los Angeles, California, is an American journalist, author, activist and independent historian. Talbot is from a media and entertainment family. Talbot attended the Harvard School for Boys but did not graduate after falling afoul of the school's headmaster and ROTC program during the Vietnam War. After graduating from the University of California at Santa Cruz, the only university that would accept him, he returned to Los Angeles, where he co-wrote a history of the Hollywood Left, Creative Differences, with Barbara Zheutlin, and freelanced for Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone, and other magazines. He was later hired by Environmental Action Foundation in Washington, D.C. to write Power and Light, a book about the politics of energy. After returning to California, he worked as an editor at Mother Jones magazine before San Francisco Examiner publisher William Randolph Hearst hired him to edit the newspaper's Sunday magazine, Image. It was at the Examiner that Talbot developed the idea for Salon, a web magazine, and convinced several of his newspaper colleagues to join him. In 1995, Talbot founded Salon in San Francisco. The magazine gained a large following and broke several major national stories. Originally created to cover books and popular culture, the website became increasingly politicized during the Clinton impeachment drama in the late 1990s. Salon broke from the mainstream press by defending the Clinton presidency and investigating the right-wing prosecutorial apparatus headed by Kenneth Starr and Rep. Henry Hyde, whose own infidelity Salon exposed. Talbot stepped down as CEO and editor-in-chief of Salon in 2005, and returned briefly as CEO in 2011, but has since left the company. Since leaving Salon, Talbot has researched and written on the Kennedy assassination and other areas of what he calls the "hidden history" of U.S. power and the liberal movements to change America, as well as his public advoca