Ben Bagdikian
| Ben Bagdikian | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 30, 1920 Maraş, Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey) |
| Died | March 11, 2016 (aged 96) Berkeley, California, U.S. |
| Nationality | Armenian, American |
| Alma mater | Clark University |
| Occupation | Journalist, media critic |
| Works | The Media Monopoly |
| Awards |
Pulitzer Prize (1953) Peabody Award (1950) |
Ben Haig Bagdikian (January 30, 1920 – March 11, 2016) was an Armenian-American educator and journalist. He was a significant American media critic and the dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Bagdikian, whose full name was Ben-Hur Bagdikian, was born Jan. 30, 1920 in present-day Turkey. His Armenian family fled the country because of persecution when he was an infant. He graduated from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1941 and became a journalist.
Bagdikian was a reporter for The Providence Journal in Rhode Island from 1947 to 1962. In 1950, Bagdikian received a Peabody Award for a series of his commentaries and criticisms of broadcasts by Walter Winchell. The award cited Bagdikian as a "brilliant young reporter". In 1953, Bagdikian was part of a Providence Journal team that shared the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of a bank robbery. In 1957, he teamed up with an African-American reporter to cover racial divisions the American South.
During 1963 to 1967 Bagdikian was a Washington-based contributing editor of The Saturday Evening Post. He also wrote freelance articles about the Civil Rights Movement, politics, poverty, housing, migration and other subjects.
Bagdikian joined the Washington Post in 1970, where he once posed as a convicted murderer to get inside a Pennsylvania maximum-security prison to report about abuses there.
In 1971 whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg gave Bagdikian portions of the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret classified history of the Vietnam War. Bagdikian passed a copy of the documents to Senator Mike Gravel, who promptly read them into the Congressional Record.
...
Wikipedia