Jonathan Alter

The 2019 HBO film Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists was co-produced and co-directed by Alter.

Alter is the author of The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, a national bestseller published by Simon & Schuster in 2006, and Between the Lines: A View Inside American Politics, People and Culture, a collection of twenty years' worth of his columns published by Borders Books. His 2010 book is The Promise: President Obama, Year One, published by Simon & Schuster, a behind-the-scenes look at Obama's eventful debut. The Promise was a New York Times Best Seller, reaching #3 on the list at its peak. Alter's book on President Obama, The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, was released on June 4, 2013. "The Center Holds" debuted on the New York Times Best Sellers list on June 23, 2013.

Alter is an executive producer of the Amazon Studios show Alpha House starring John Goodman. Written by Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, the comedy series revolves around four Republican U.S. Senators who live together in a townhouse on Capitol Hill. After developing the script with Trudeau, Alter sold the pilot to Amazon, which picked up the show as its first original series. The eleven-episode first season began streaming online in late 2013. Production for the second season of Alpha House began in the summer of 2014.

In April 2011, Alter left Newsweek, joining Bloomberg days after.

In 2009, Alter was the commencement speaker at Western Connecticut State University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate. He also has received honorary degrees from Utica College (2008) and Montclair State University (2009).

On NBC's Today Show, Alter was the correspondent for several stories about the effect of the Iraq War on returning veterans. The Defining Moment, which was reviewed respectfully, surprised some critics with its analysis which concluded that the United States had come very close to dictatorship before Franklin D. Roosevelt became president, painting him as the savior of American democracy and capitalism. During an interview with 60 Minutes on November 14, 2008, then-President-elect Barack Obama said he had recently been reading The Defining Moment and hoped to apply some of Roosevelt's strategies that were outlined in the book into his own administration.

A veteran of Chicago politics, Alter has known President Obama and his closest confidantes for as long as nearly any national columnist, having published the first national magazine cover story on Obama in Newsweek's 2004 "Who's Next Issue."

Alter was a fierce critic of President George W. Bush, emphasizing what he considered Bush's lack of accountability and his position on embryonic stem cell research. Alter, a cancer survivor, has written about his own bout with lymphoma and experience with an autologous adult stem cell transplant. Despite calling Bush's tone "destructive to American interests," Alter supported Bush's invasion of Iraq, writing in February 2003, "Osama Bin Laden hit us on 9/11 because he thought we were soft and would not respond. Weakness now would further embolden Saddam Hussein."

Alter gained international notoriety on election night 2000, when on NBC with Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw, he claimed that the election would be settled in court. He was the first pundit to predict the months-long recount process.

Alter lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife, Emily Jane Lazar, an executive producer of the former Comedy Central show The Colbert Report, and their three children: Charlotte (b. 1990), a writer for TIME Magazine, Tommy (b. 1991), a producer for HBO Sports, and Molly (b. 1993), who works in venture capital.

For a decade in the 1980s, Alter was Newsweek's media critic, where he was among the first in the mainstream media to break tradition and hold other news organizations accountable for their coverage, a precursor to the role later played by blogs. When Newsweek launched his wide-ranging column in 1991, it was the first time the magazine allowed regular political commentary in the magazine, other than on the back page. After the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, during which Alter was a consultant to MTV, he was among a small group of reporters and columnists who had regular access to Clinton, though he was far from a reliable supporter, particularly during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. "Alter bites me in the ass sometimes, but at least he knows what we're trying to do," Clinton was quoted as saying in the book Media Circus by The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz.

Jonathan H. Alter (born October 6, 1957) is a liberal / progressive American journalist, best-selling author, documentary filmmaker and television producer who was a columnist and senior editor for Newsweek magazine from 1983 until 2011, and has written three New York Times best-selling books about American presidents. He is a contributing correspondent to NBC News, where since 1996 he has appeared on NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC. Alter was one of the first magazine or newspaper reporters to appear on MSNBC. When the shows were on the air, he could often be heard on Imus in the Morning and The Al Franken Show on Air America Radio. In 2013 and 2014, Alter served as an executive producer on the Amazon Studio's production Alpha House, which starred John Goodman, Mark Consuelos, Clark Johnson, and Matt Malloy. In 2019, he co-produced and co-directed "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists," a documentary about the columnists Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, which is available on HBO.

Alter was raised in a Jewish family in Chicago, the son of James Alter (1922–2014), who owned a refrigeration and air-conditioning company, and Joanne (née Hammerman) (1927–2008), who was an elected commissioner of the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago and a member of the Democratic National Committee. His mother was the first woman in the Chicago area to be elected to public office. He graduated from Phillips Academy in 1975 and Harvard University in 1979, where he was one of the lead editors on the Harvard Crimson.