Marc
Ambinder

Adjunct Professor of Journalism, University of Southern California

Marc Ambinder teaches investigative reporting and national security reporting at the University of Southern California and is author of On The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983 (Simon & Schuster, July 2018). As a journalist, he secured unprecedented access to the protective details of the Secret Service, broke stories about dangerous computer failures that jeopardized America’s nuclear arsenal, probed Pakistan’s fragile intelligence services, and became an authority on topics ranging from the National Security Agency and surveillance to the government’s secret commando force to its continuity of government plans. Before moving to Los Angeles, Mark lived in Washington, D.C., where he was the senior White House correspondent for National Journal, the politics editor of the Atlantic, and an on-air analyst and consultant for CBS News. He spent four years at ABC News, covering elections and policy from the Washington bureau.

I am most excited to work on projects that… will speak directly to younger audiences and to voters about nuclear policy.

I am looking for partners that can help me… develop new ways to explain and engage audiences about deterrence, nuclear command and control systems, proliferation, and nuclear decision-making.

A moment when I felt most inspired in my work was… when, at a meeting with a serving CIA director, another journalist asked him to describe what the agency believed was happening with Pakistan’s nuclear weapons security, and the director pointed at me, and said, “Well, it’s pretty much all in his article.”

Innovations in my field that I am most excited to work on… include advanced communication and storytelling techniques, research on persuasion and communication, and the leveraging of ties to the entertainment industry to tell these stories.

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