Ben Bagdikian

Ben Haig Bagdikian (January 30, 1920 – March 11, 2016) was an Armenian-American journalist, news media critic and commentator, and university professor.

An Armenian Genocide survivor, Bagdikian moved to the United States as an infant and began a journalism career after serving in World War II. He had a successful career as a local reporter, investigative journalist and foreign correspondent for the Providence Journal. During his time there he won a Peabody Award and a Pulitzer Prize. In 1971 he received parts of the Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg and successfully pursued the Washington Post to publish them despite objections and threats from the Richard Nixon administration. Bagdikian later taught at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and served as its dean.

Bagdikian was a well-known critic of the news media. His 1983 book The Media Monopoly, warning about the growing concentration of ownership of news organizations, went through several editions and influenced, among others, Noam Chomsky. Bagdikian has been hailed for his ethical standards and has been described by Robert W. McChesney as one of the finest journalists of the 20th century.

Life
Ben-Hur Haig Bagdikian, born in Marash, Ottoman Empire on January 30, 1920, was the fifth and youngest child of Aram Baghdikian (1882−1957) and Dudeh "Daisy" Uvezian (1886−1923). His father did post-graduate work at the American University of Beirut and taught physics and chemistry at St. Paul's College in Tarsus, run by Boston Congregationalists. His family left Marash on February 9, 1920, just ten days after Ben was born. They left during the Armenian Genocide, as Turkish forces reached the city, while the French retreated. While escaping persecution, the infant was dropped in the snow in the mountains while the family was climbing thinking he was dead, but was picked up only when he began to cry. They arrived, first, in Boston and subsequently settled in Stoneham, Massachusetts. His father was a pastor at several Armenian churches in the Boston area (in Watertown, Cambridge) and Worcester. His mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis almost immediately after arrival in Boston and died three years later after spending some time hospitalized in sanitariums. Bagdikian was known throughout his life as Ben, though his baptismal name was Ben-Hur, after the Christian-themed historical novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace. Bagdikian grew up during the Great Depression, which, according to Robert D. McFadden, enforced a "passion for social justice that shaped his reporting." Bagdikian described himself as an "Armenian overlaid by, of all things, the culture of New England Yankee." Due to his father's role, Bagdikian regularly attended sermons and "disliked the avenging God of the Old Testament and was outraged when Abraham was prepared to obey the order to sacrifice his son as a gesture of faith." Later in adulthood, Bagdikian became a member of the First Unitarian Church of Providence, a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Rhode Island.

Bagdikian graduated from Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, as a pre-medical student. He was editor of The Clark News, the college newspaper. Having taken many chemistry courses he sought to apply for a job as a chemist. Bagdikian briefly worked for the Springfield Morning Union, in Springfield, Massachusetts, as a reporter. He served as a navigator (first lieutenant) in the United States Army Air Forces from May 1942 to January 1946, serving during World War II.

Bagdikian married Elizabeth (Betty) Ogasapian in 1942 with whom he had two boys: Aram Christopher "Chris" Bagdikian (1944−2015) and Frederick, Jr. "Eric" Bagdikian (born 1951). They divorced in 1972. His second marriage, to Betty Medsger, a Washington Post reporter, ended in divorce as well. His third wife was Marlene Griffith, whom he married in 1983.

Bagdikian died at his home in Berkeley, California on March 11, 2016, aged 96. A memorial service was held at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley on June 2, 2016.

Career
Throughout his career, Bagdikian contributed to more than 200 national magazines and journals.

The Providence Journal
Bagdikian began working for the Providence Journal in 1947 as a reporter and Washington bureau chief. He also served as a local reporter. Bagdikian and Journal editor and publisher Sevellon Brown won a Peabody Award in 1951 for their "most exacting, thorough and readable check-up of broadcasts" of Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson, and Fulton Lewis, leading TV and radio commentators. He shared the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, Edition Time for the coverage of a bank robbery in East Providence, a police chase, and a hostage standoff that resulted in the death of a patrolman. As a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, he covered the Suez Crisis in the fall of 1956 riding with an Israeli tank crew. In 1957 Bagdikian covered the African-American Civil Rights Movement, especially the crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas. In the fall of that year he traveled to the South with black reporter James "Jim" N. Rhea to cover the widespread discontent of the whites with the Supreme Court order to desegregate public schools.

Freelance
Bagdikian began a freelance career after leaving the Providence Journal in 1961. He researched media matters at the Library of Congress with the Guggenheim Fellowship he was awarded in 1961. Subsequently, he was a Washington-based contributing editor of the Saturday Evening Post from 1963 to 1967. He also wrote for the New York Times Magazine when he focused on social issues, such as poverty, housing, migration. Bagdikian researched news media at the RAND Corporation in 1969–70 and published a book titled The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media in 1971, which was praised as a "readable report that one might expect from a first-rank professional writer. More impressive than the readability is the breadth and depth of his perception of technological and economic trends and his insight into potential social and political consequences." He also wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review between 1972 and 1974.

Washington Post
Bagdikian joined the Washington Post in 1970 and later served as its assistant managing editor and in 1972 its second ombudsman as a representative of the readers.

In June 1971 Bagdikian, as the assistant managing editor for national news at the Post, met with Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst, who passed him 4,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers, excerpts from which were published by the New York Times days earlier and halted by a federal judge. While the Post lawyers and management were opposed, Bagdikian argued strongly in favor of publication of the documents despite pressure from the Nixon administration not to on national security grounds. Bagdikian famously stated: "the (only) way to assert the right to publish is to publish." The first part was published by the Post on June 18, 1971. William Rehnquist phoned Post executive editor Ben Bradlee and threatened with prosecution if the publication of the documents was not stopped. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that "to exercise prior restraint, the Government must show sufficient evidence that the publication would cause a 'grave and irreparable' danger."

Just months after the publication of the Pentagon Papers Bagdikian became an undercover inmate at the Huntingdon State Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania, to expose the harsh prison conditions. With permission from the attorney general of Pennsylvania, he disguised himself as a murderer to observe the prison life without the knowledge of anyone inside the prison. He remained there for six days and his eight-part series on the conditions of the prison were published in the Post from January 29 to February 6, 1972. He reported "widespread racial tension behind bars, outbursts of violence, open 'homosexualism' and an elaborate, yet fragile, code of etiquette." Bagdikian and Post reporter Leon Dash published the series first as a report (The Shame of the Prisons, Pocket Books, 1972) and later as a book (Caged: Eight Prisoners and Their Keepers, Harper & Row, 1976).

He became the second ombudsman of the Post in 1972, but left the paper in August of that year after clashing with Bradlee "as a conduit of outside and internal complaints."

UC Berkeley
Bagdikian taught at University of California, Berkeley from 1976 until he retired in 1990. He taught courses such as Introduction to Journalism and Ethics in Journalism. He was the dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism from 1985 to 1988. He was named Professor Emeritus upon departure.

In 1987 Bagdikian testified on the effects of profit on news reporting before the House Energy Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, along with economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

Media criticism
Bagdikian is famously quoted as telling his students at UC Berkeley:

In an interview with PBS's Frontline Bagdikian stated that while the First Amendment allows newspapers to print anything, especially unpopular things, newspapers have an implied moral obligation to be responsible, because of their power on popular opinion and because the First Amendment was "framed with the supposition that there would be multiple sources of information."

Bagdikian was an early advocate of in-house critics, or ombudsmen in newspapers, who he believed, would "address public concerns about journalistic practices." He described the treatment of news about tobacco and related health issues as "one of the original sins of the media," because "for decades, there was suppression of medical evidence ... plain suppression." Bagdikian criticized the wide use of anonymous sources in news media, the acceptance of government narratives by reporter, particularly on "national security" grounds. Bagdikian formulated a law, dubbed the Bagdikian Law of Journalism: "The accuracy of news reports of an event is inversely proportional to the number of reporters on the scene."

He was a harsh critic of TV news and the celebrity status of news anchors, which he argued, was the "worst thing that can happen to a journalist." He noted, "The job of the celebrity is to be observed, to make sure others learn about him or her, to be the object of attention rather than an observer." Bagdikian stressed the importance of local media. He argued that only locally based journalism can adequately report the local issues and candidates, otherwise "voters become captives of the only alternative information, paid political propaganda, or no information at all." Regarding online journalism, Bagdikian stated that although there is "lots of junk on it, but it’s still an outlet for an independent with no money but plenty of ingenuity and skill, like MoveOn.org. It’s not controlled by the corporations. Not yet."

When asked about what newspaper he recommends, Bagdikian said that he is a regular New York Times reader, and appreciates The Nation, The Progressive, alternative radio, The New York Review of Books, and also reads Time and Newsweek to "get a view of the total picture most magazine readers are getting." He also occasionally read the National Review and The Weekly Standard "to know what the right is thinking." Bagdikian named the Nation, the Progressive and Newsweek his favorite newspapers.

Publications
Bagdikian's first book, In the Midst of Plenty: The Poor in America, was published in 1964 by Beacon Press and covered various categories of poverty in America, including the poor in Appalachia, the elderly in Los Angeles, men in flophouses in Chicago, and others. His studies at the RAND Corporation produced two books: The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media and The Effete Conspiracy and Other Crimes by the Press, published by Harper & Row in 1971 and 1972, respectively.

He memoir, Double Vision: Reflections on My Heritage, Life and Profession, was published by Beacon Press in 1995.

The Media Monopoly
In 1983 Bagdikian authored a widely cited and acclaimed work, The Media Monopoly, which was published by Beacon Press after it was rejected by Simon & Schuster. Richard E. Snyder, Simon & Schuster's president, was, according to Bagdikian, "vehemently opposed to the manuscript, because, among other reasons, [Snyder] felt it made all corporations look bad." The book describes the increasing concentration of the media in the US in the hands of corporate owners, which, he argued, threatened freedom of expression and independent journalism. He wrote that some 50 corporations controlled what most people in the United Stats read and watched. Bagdikian argued that "media power is political power." The book went into 5 more editions—in 1987, 1990, 1993, 1997, 2000. In 2004, The New Media Monopoly was published, essentially the 7th edition of the original. In 2000 Bagdikian stated, "Every edition has been considered by some to be alarmist and every edition ends up being too conservative." In this latest version, Bagdikian wrote that the number of corporations controlling most of the media decreased to 5: Disney, News Corporation, Time Warner, Viacom, and Bertelsmann. He argued, "This gives each of the five corporations and their leaders more communications power than was exercised by any despot or dictatorship in history."

The book became a "standard text for many college classes" and, according to Neil Henry, a classic that, along with Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, is the "most widely cited scholarly work about the effects of economics on modern news media practices, including market and political pressures that determine news content." The book was criticized by some for alleged bias and inaccuracies. Christian Science Monitor writer, though noting the problems, declared that it is a "groundbreaking work that charts a historic shift in the orientation of the majority of America's communications media—further away from the needs of the individual and closer to those of big business."

Political views
In 1997 Bagdikian opined that "criticizing capitalism has never been a popular subject in the general news."

In the 2000 U.S. presidential election Bagdikian endorsed Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate. He was a founding member of the grassroots network Armenians for Nader. He stated: "I think Ralph Nader has already powerfully defined the issues in this campaign and has had influence on the positions of both major party candidates." He argued that "there's a natural hostility among corporate organizations toward Nader, because they see him as the person who's embarrassed them endlessly and sees them as part of the national political problem."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had a 200-page file on Bagdikian spanning from 1951 to 1971. One document described him as well known in FBI files as a "writer who has criticized the FBI in the past. He has made snide remarks relative to" FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and "some of his work has been described [specifically, by Hoover] as 'utter bunk'."

Legacy and recognition
C. Edwin Baker describes Bagdikian as "probably the most quoted, certainly one of the most acute, commentators on media ownership." Arthur S. Hayes, Fordham University professor, wrote in his 2008 book Press Critics Are the Fifth Estate that Bagdikian has been "farsighted, inspirational, influential, long lasting, and a forerunner." Sociologist Alfred McClung Lee praised Bagdikian as having the virtues of both an investigative journalist and a participant-observing social scientist. Robert D. McFadden of The New York Times called Bagdikian "a celebrated voice of conscience for his profession, calling for tougher standards of integrity and public service in an era of changing tastes and technology." Edward Wasserman, the dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism at the time of his death, Bagdikian was a "major figure in 20th century US journalism and journalism education, and we’re all his beneficiaries." Jeff Cohen, the founder of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) stated:

Robert W. McChesney, who cites Bagdikian as one of the strongest influences on him, called Bagdikian one of the finest journalists of the 20th century. McChesney argued that Bagdikian was "certainly accorded more respect by working journalists" than Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, the authors of Manufacturing Consent, due to their perceived radicalism, in contrast to Bagdikian's liberal views. Progressive journalist and writer John Nichols, writing for the Nation, called Bagdikian a "pioneering media reformer." He said of Bagdikian in an interview with Democracy Now!:

Awards and honors

 * Peabody Award (1950)
 * Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, Edition Time (1953)
 * Hillman Prize (1956)
 * Guggenheim Fellowship (1961)
 * James Madison Award (1998)

Bagdikian received honorary degrees, among others, from Brown University (Doctor of Humane Letters, 1961), Clark University (Doctor of Letters, 1963), Berkeley Citation from University of California, Berkeley (equivalent of an honorary degree, 1990), University of Rhode Island (Doctor of Letters, 1992). He was the commencement speaker of the 1972 Journalism Convocation of Northwestern University.

The fellowship program of the progressive magazine Mother Jones is named for Bagdikian due to his "professional record, his personal integrity, and his commitment to social justice."

Bagdikian was inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame on October 30, 2016. According to the board he had "long and significant ties to Rhode Island."