Frankel was born in the Bronx, on October 2, 1949, grew up in Rochester, New York, and graduated from
Columbia University in 1971. He began his journalism career in 1973 as a staff writer for the
Richmond Mercury in Richmond, Virginia. After the
Mercury ceased publication in 1975, he joined the
Bergen Record in Hackensack, New Jersey. In 1979, he joined the Metro staff of
The Washington Post. After spending the 1982-83 academic year as a Professional Journalism Fellow at Stanford University he became the ''Post's'' Southern Africa bureau chief, based in Harare, Zimbabwe, where he covered famine, war, and the struggle against South Africa's apartheid regime. In 1986 he moved to Jerusalem, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for "sensitive and balanced coverage" of the first Palestinian uprising. From 1989 to 1992 he served as the ''Post's
London bureau chief, covering the political demise of Margaret Thatcher, the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first Gulf War. He returned to The Washington Post
newsroom in 1993 where he served as Deputy National News Editor and editor of the Post's
Sunday magazine, after which he returned to London for a second term as bureau chief. After leaving the Post in 2006, he spent four years as the Lorry Lokey Visiting Professor in journalism at Stanford, serving as faculty advisor to the Stanford Daily and The Real News'', Stanford's only African-American news publication. From 2010 to 2014 he served as G.B. Dealey Regents Professor in Journalism at
UT Austin and director of the School of Journalism. Besides writing for
The Washington Post, Frankel's work has appeared in
Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Mother Jones, New Statesman, Moment,
Zocalo Public Square, and several anthologies. == Books ==