Stephen Talbot is the son of the late Lyle Talbot, a 1930s movie star and a veteran TV and stage actor. Stephen Talbot attended Harvard High School (now called Harvard-Westlake) in North Hollywood (class of 1966) and graduated in 1970 from Wesleyan University (Connecticut) where he was very active in anti-Vietnam war protests. He began making films about the anti-war movement, including March on Washington, DC III (about Vietnam Veterans Against the War), and Year of the Tiger (filmed in Vietnam).

Talbot guest-starred on many television programs in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Lassie, M Squad, The Barbara Stanwyck Show, The Blue Angels,Men Into Space, Lawman, Wanted: Dead or Alive, "Law of the Plainsman", The Donna Reed Show and The Lucy Show. He appeared in comedy sketches with Bob Newhart in the early '60s NBC variety program, "The Bob Newhart Show." Talbot played the role of "Ronnie Kramer" in the episode, "I Hit and Ran," of CBS's anthology series The DuPont Show with June Allyson. Talbot also appeared in two episodes of The Twilight Zone.

In 1959, he was cast as Ab Martin, a grade-school pupil in the episode "The Twister" of the ABC/Warner Brothers western series, Sugarfoot, with Will Hutchins in the title role. In the episode, he recites to his dying Teacher, Roy Cantwell (Fred Beir) a part of Patrick Henry's 1775 address at St. Johns' Church. The "twister" in the title of the episode is a tornado that wipes out a western town.

He also played Dick Clark's nephew in the first movie Clark ever acted in, Because They're Young (1960), a high school melodrama with Tuesday Weld and music by "rock 'n roller" Duane Eddy.

After graduating from Wesleyan, Talbot worked from 1970-1973 at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, then an experimental college on Long Island. He began as assistant to the President John Maguire and went on to become a lecturer in the American Studies program.

In the 1980s, Talbot was a staff reporter and Producer at KQED-TV, the PBS affiliate in San Francisco, where he produced local documentaries, as well as national PBS documentaries such as "Namibia: Behind the Lines," South Africa Under Siege (a portrait of Nelson Mandela's ANC in exile), and The Gospel and Guatemala (an investigation of presidential strongman Efrain Rios Montt and his US supporters) with Elizabeth Farnsworth. At KQED, Talbot also reported and produced dozens of feature stories for The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour.

Talbot's many TV documentaries include two Peabody Award winners, Broken Arrow, about nuclear weapons accidents, and, The Case of Dashiell Hammett," a biography of the crime Writer. Talbot has had a long association with the PBS series Frontline beginning with his documentary on the financing of the 1992 presidential campaign, "The Best Campaign Money Can Buy," which won a DuPont Award and continuing through 2007 with his documentary on the media, "News War: What's Happening to the News."

For KQED in 2001, he produced a one-hour documentary about Jerry Brown as mayor of Oakland, The Celebrity and the City. He had previously produced a KQED documentary about San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos, "The Art of Being Mayor."

From 2002–2008, Talbot was the series Editor and a senior Producer for Frontline/World, the international TV news magazine program and website. With reporter Kate Seelye, he also produced a half-hour FRONTLINE/World story, "The Earthquake", about political turmoil in Lebanon and Syria. He was senior Producer of the Emmy-winning FRONTLINE/World documentary by Gwynne Roberts, "Iraq: Saddam's Road to Hell," an investigation of a massacre of Kurds carried out by Saddam Hussein's regime.

For Oregon Public Broadcasting, Talbot wrote and directed with David Davis, The Sixties: The Years That Shaped a Generation, a two-hour history special that aired nationally on PBS in 2005, and was based on his earlier film, 1968: The Year That Shaped a Generation."

In 2007 he produced, "What's Happening to the News" a 90-minute episode of the Frontline "News War" series. His other Frontline news documentaries include "The Best Campaign Money Can Buy", "The Heartbeat of America" (an investigation of General Motors), "Public Lands, Private Profits" (about gold mining on federal land in the West), "Rush Limbaugh's America", "The Long March of Newt Gingrich", "Why America Hates the Press", "Spying on Saddam", "Justice for Sale" with Bill Moyers, and "The Battle Over School Choice".

He has executive produced a number of indie documentaries, including The Price of Sex, a documentary by Director and photo Journalist Mimi Chakarova about sex trafficking in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Chakarova won the 2011 Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking from the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York and the Daniel Pearl Award from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Talbot's sister, New Yorker magazine staffer Margaret Talbot, wrote The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century (Riverhead Books, 2012), about their father, Lyle Talbot, and their family history. His brother, David, is the author of several books, including "Season of the Witch" about San Francisco in the '60s and '70s, and was the founder and original Editor of Salon.com. His sister, Cynthia, is a medical Doctor in Portland, Oregon.

His "investigative biography" of Newt Gingrich – "The Long March of Newt Gingrich" (1995) with correspondent Peter Boyer – drew renewed interest and was posted with updates on the Frontline website in 2012 when Gingrich made his unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

Stephen Talbot lives in San Francisco with his wife, Pippa Gordon, a medical social worker. They have a son, Dashiell, and a daughter, Caitlin. They named their son Dashiell, now a deputy counsel for the County of Los Angeles, after San Francisco mystery Writer Dashiell Hammett. His daughter, Caitlin, is an Actress and yoga instructor, who graduated with an M.F.A. from American Conservatory Theater, in San Francisco. In 2015, he wrote a story reminiscing about the home birth of his daughter.