Neal Gabler is an American journalist, historian and film critic. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Michigan and holds advanced degrees in both film and American culture.
Gabler has contributed to numerous publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Esquire, New York Magazine, Vogue, American Heritage, The New Republic, Us, and Playboy. He has appeared on many television programs, including The Today Show, CBS Morning News, The News Hour, Entertainment Tonight, Charlie Rose, and Good Morning America. He hosted Sneak Previews for PBS, and introduced films on the cable network AMC.
He is the author of five books: An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1989), Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity (1994), Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (1998); Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (2006); and Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity, and Power (2016).
In 2016 Gabler attracted commentary for his cover story in The Atlantic entitled "The Shame of Middle Class Americans", in which he described the precarious debt and financial difficulties of many middle and upper class Americans, and described in some detail his own financial insecurity.
Gabler has taught at the University of Michigan and at Pennsylvania State University. He is currently Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center. As of September 2011, Gabler is a Research Fellow at the Shorenstein Center for the Press, Public Policy and Politics at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. An excerpt from Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality by Gabler was used on the AP English Language exam.
In 1982, Gabler paired with Jeffrey Lyons as replacement movie reviewers for the PBS show Sneak Previews. The original hosts of Sneak Previews, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, had left the show for contractual reasons and Gabler and Lyons went to Chicago to produce the show. He was a writer for the Detroit Free Press at the time. Gabler left Sneak Previews in 1985 citing differences with the direction of the show. He was replaced by Michael Medved, who had had occasional appearances on Sneak Previews before replacing Gabler full-time.
