Michael Isikoff joined NBC News in July 2010 as national investigative correspondent. He had been at Newsweek since 1994 as an investigative correspondent.
He has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the Abu Ghraib scandal, campaign-finance and congressional ethics abuses, 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 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.
Since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, Isikoff has broken repeated stories about the U.S. government's war on terror and won numerous journalism awards. Isikoff's June 2002 Newsweek cover story on U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the 9/11 terror attacks, along with a series of related articles, was honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative reporting in magazine journalism. He was honored, along with a team of Newsweek reporters, by the Society of Professional Journalists for coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Isikoff was also part of a reporting team that earned Newsweek the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2002, for its coverage of the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
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 came to Newsweek from The Washington Post, where he had been a reporter since September 1981. 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.
Please send your story ideas and comments to Michael Isikoff.