Stanley Meisler was born in New York and received his BA in English Literature from the City College of New York. He did graduate work in English Literature and African History at the University of California at Berkeley, and received a Fellowship from the Ford Foundation in Area Training in African Studies. He worked as a reporter with the Associated Press from 1954 to 1964; was a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in Nairobi covering Sub-Saharan Africa from 1967 to 1973; in Mexico City covering Latin America from 1973 to 1976; in Madrid covering Spain and Portugal from 1976 to 1978; in Toronto covering Canada and Latin America from 1978 to 1983; in Paris covering France and Spain from 1983 to 1988; in New York City covering the United Nations from 1991 to 1996; and was a foreign affairs writer in Washington DC from 1988 to 1998.

Meisler was the recipient of the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award and the Korn-Ferry Award for International Excellence in United Nations Reporting.

He is the author of United Nations : The First Fifty Years, writes regularly for the Smithsonian Magazine and has been publishing his Online News Commentary since 1996.

He has also written numerous articles for The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review, Quarterly Journal of Military History, Foreign Policy, and The Washington Monthly.

Stanley is married to Elizabeth Fox, development communication expert and editor of the book Latin Politics, Global Media.

Regarding journalism:

2002 Lecture Series on Foreign Affairs and Journalism (listen)
Institute for International Journalism
Scripps School of Journalism

The Massacre in El Mozote
Case Study Curriculum Project
Project for Excellence in Journalism

some articles from the past:

The Lost Dreams of Howard Fast
"For many years Howard Fast the Communist obscured our view of Howard Fast the writer. Flaunting contempt at Congress, issuing tracts against "bourgeois, decadent" authors, rallying sympathy for the Soviet Union, he stood between us and his books and kept us from a special insight into the intellect of an American Communist. Fast, who has left the party, may have represented, in some ways, the essence of America's own brand of communism. The clues to understanding him as a Communist lie in understanding him as a writer..."
The Nation
May 30, 1959

Rwanda and Burundi
"The enormity and horror of it all are exposed by what a visitor does not see in Bujumbura. Bujumbura, a languid, colorless, nondescript town on Lake Tanganyika, is the capital of Burundi, a central African nub of a country in which 85 percent of the population is Hutu. Yet a visitor can find few Hutus in Bujumbura. It is a little like entering Warsaw after World War II and looking for Jews. A visitor would not need a tour of Treblinka to know that something terrible had happened..."
The Atlantic Monthly
September 1973