Isikoff has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the Enron scandal, the Florida election recount, campaign finance abuses, presidential politics and other national issues. He has been a news analyst for MSNBC and a frequent guest on NBC's Meet the Press, PBS's Charlie Rose, CNN's Newsnight with Aaron Brown, and other nationally syndicated radio and TV talk shows.

Ever since the events of September 11, Michael Isikoff has broken repeated stories about the U.S. government's war on terror and won numerous journalism awards. Isikoff's June 2002 Newsweek cover story on U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the 9-11 terror attacks, along with a series of related articles, was honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative reporting in magazine journalism. He was honored, along with a team of Newsweek reporters, with the Overseas Press Club's most prestigious award, the 2001 Ed Cunningham Memorial Award for best magazine reporting from abroad for Newsweek's coverage of the war on terror. The reporting of Isikoff and his Newsweek colleagues also earned Newsweek the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2002, the highest award in magazine journalism, for their coverage of the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.

Isikoff's exclusive reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal gained him national attention in 1998, including profiles in The New York Times and The Washington Post and a guest appearance on Late Show with David Letterman. His coverage of the events that lead to President Clinton's impeachment earned Newsweek the prestigious National Magazine Award in the Reporting category in 1999. Isikoff's reporting also won the National Headliner Award, the Edgar A. Poe Award presented by the White House Correspondents Association and the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. In 2001, Michael Isikoff was named on a list of the "most influential journalists" in the nation's capital by Washingtonian magazine.

Michael Isikoff is the author of Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story, a book that chronicled his own reporting of the Lewinsky story and was hailed by a critic for The Washington Post-Los Angeles Times news service as "the absolutely essential narrative of the scandal with revelations that no one would have thought possible." The book was an instant New York Times bestseller and was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Book of the Month Club.

Isikoff came to Newsweek from The Washington Post, where he had been a reporter since September 1981. There he covered the Justice Department and the Persian Gulf War, reported on international drug operations in Latin America, and worked on the Post's financial news desk. Before joining the Post, he was a reporter with the now-defunct Washington Star.

Michael Isikoff graduated from Washington University with a B.A. degree in 1974 and received a masters in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1976.