Michael D. Shear

Michael D. Shear is an American journalist who is a White House correspondent for The New York Times. He previously worked at The Washington Post, where he was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. He regularly appears on CNN and MSNBC.

Shear received a B.A. from Claremont McKenna College in 1990 and then a M.A. degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University.

Shear's reporting career began in 1989 when still a junior in college, he interned at the Los Angeles Times' Washington Bureau covering hearings on Capitol Hill and other high-profile stories including the trial of Oliver North and the anniversary of cameras in Congress. After graduation, he worked briefly as a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News before returning to full-time education to pursue a degree in public policy.

He returned to reporting by first writing for The Tampa Tribune before taking up a more permanent role as a metro reporter at The Washington Post in 1992, where he reported on a wide variety of topics. He was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings.

In 2010, Shear moved to the Washington bureau of The New York Times as a political correspondent, where he covered Barack Obama's re-election campaign in 2012 before returning in 2013 as a White House correspondent for The Times to focus on the 2016 US Presidential Election. Since the election, Shear has reported on domestic policy and Donald J. Trump. He has made regular appearances as a political commentator on radio and television.

His book, Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration, co-written with Julie Hirschfield Davis, will be published by Simon & Schuster in October 2019.

Shear lives with his wife and two teenage children in Virginia.