Ben Bagdikian

Ben-Hur Haig Bagdikian,[5][6] born in Marash, Ottoman Empire, on January 30, 1920, was the fifth and youngest child of Aram Toros "Theodore" Bagdikian[7] (1882−1957) and Dudeh "Daisy" Uvezian (1886−1923).[8] He had four sisters.[9] His mother's family was well-off, while his father came from a peasant family. He did graduate work at the American University of Beirut.[7] The family was mostly based in Tarsus, where his father taught physics and chemistry at St. Paul's College in Tarsus, run by Boston Congregationalists.[6][10][7] His family knew English well.[11] His father also spoke Armenian, Turkish, Arabic, and learned the Biblical languages.[12]

His family left Marash on February 9, 1920, just ten days after Ben was born. They left during the Armenian genocide,[8] as Turkish forces reached the city, while the French retreated.[13] While escaping persecution, Bagdikian was dropped in the snow in the mountains while the family was climbing. Only an infant, he was thought to be dead. He was picked up when he began to cry.[5][14] 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. He had taken courses at the Harvard Divinity School and had been ordained.[15] His mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis almost immediately after arrival in Boston and died three years later, after spending some time hospitalized in sanatoriums.[6][16]

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.[14] Bagdikian grew up during the Great Depression, which, according to Robert D. McFadden, enforced a "passion for social justice that shaped his reporting."[8] He described himself as an "Armenian overlaid by, of all things, the culture of New England Yankee."[14]

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."[10] Later in adulthood, Bagdikian became a member of the First Unitarian Church of Providence, a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Rhode Island.[10]

Bagdikian initially aspired to become a doctor because of his mother's illness and his father's collection of books on pulmonary diseases that he read.[17] He graduated from Stoneham High School in 1937.[18] He thereafter attended Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, as a pre-medical student.[10] He was editor of The Clark News, the college newspaper. He renamed it to The Clark Scarlet, based on the school's colors. The university president, Wallace Walter Atwood, suspected it was too closely associated with communism.[19][20] Having taken many chemistry courses he sought to apply for a job as a chemist upon graduating from Clark in 1941.[18][14] He had the opportunity to work as a lab assistant at Monsanto in Springfield, Massachusetts.[21]

He served as a navigator (first lieutenant) in the United States Army Air Forces from May 1942 to January 1946.[1][8] He had volunteered to joined the Air Forces immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.[22]

Bagdikian married Elizabeth (Betty) Ogasapian in 1942, with whom he had two sons: Aram Christopher "Chris" Bagdikian (1944−2015) and Frederick, Jr. "Eric" Bagdikian (born 1951). They divorced in 1972.[6][8] His second marriage, to Betty Medsger, a Washington Post reporter, ended in divorce as well.[5] His third wife was Marlene Griffith (born Marie Helene Ungar in Vienna), whom he married in 1983.[23][6][8]

Bagdikian died at his home in Berkeley, California, on March 11, 2016, aged 96.[8][24] A memorial service was held at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley on June 2, 2016.[25]

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.[14][5] He was a member of the staff that received the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, Edition Time for coverage of a bank robbery in East Providence (including an ensuing police chase and hostage standoff) that resulted in the death of a patrolman.[29][8] Bagdikian later described the paper as one of the better papers, besides their pro-Republican and anti-union editorials.[30]

As a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, he covered the Suez Crisis in the fall of 1956 riding with an Israeli tank crew.[8] In 1957, Bagdikian covered the civil rights movement, especially the crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas.[31] In the fall of that year he traveled to the South with black reporter James "Jim" N. Rhea[29][14] to cover the widespread discontent of the whites with the Supreme Court order to desegregate public schools.[32]

Bagdikian began a freelance career after leaving the Providence Journal in 1961.[14] He researched media matters at the Library of Congress with the Guggenheim Fellowship he was awarded in 1961.[33][27] 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, and 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․ Edwin B. Parker of Stanford University praised the report for its readability, and breadth and depth of Bagdikian's "perception of technological and economic trends and his insight into potential social and political consequences."[34]

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.[8][5]

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.[5] While the Post lawyers and management were opposed,[35] Bagdikian argued strongly in favor of publication of the documents despite pressure from the Nixon administration not to on national security grounds.[8] Bagdikian famously stated: "the (only) way to assert the right to publish is to publish."[5][36][37][38][39] The first part was published by the Post on June 18, 1971.[40] William Rehnquist phoned Post executive editor Ben Bradlee and threatened him 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."[5]

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.[8] 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.[41] 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 in 1972 and later as a book (1976).[42][5]

Bagdikian left the Post in August 1972 after clashing with Bradlee "as a conduit of outside and internal complaints."[5][43]

Bagdikian wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review from 1972 to 1974.[8] He taught at University of California, Berkeley from 1976 until his retirement in 1990. He taught courses such as Introduction to Journalism and Ethics in Journalism.[44] He was the dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism from 1985 to 1988.[8][14] He was named Professor Emeritus upon departure.[45]

In 1983 Bagdikian authored a widely cited and acclaimed work,[52] The Media Monopoly, which was published by Beacon Press after it was rejected by Simon & Schuster.[53][54] 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."[55] The book examines 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 States read and watched.[8] Bagdikian argued that "media power is political power."[56] 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.[14] In 2000 Bagdikian stated, "Every edition has been considered by some to be alarmist and every edition ends up being too conservative."[57] In this latest version, Bagdikian wrote that the number of corporations controlling most of the media decreased to five: Disney, News Corporation, Time Warner, Viacom, and Bertelsmann.[58] 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."[8]

The book became a "standard text for many college classes"[59] and, along with Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in the opinion of Neil Henry, is a work that 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."[60] The book was criticized by Jack Shafer for alleged bias.[61] The Christian Science Monitor, though accepting such 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."[62]

• Peabody Award (1950)[79]
• Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, Edition Time (staff contributor; 1953)[80]
• Hillman Prize (1956) for his series on civil liberties[81]
• Guggenheim Fellowship (1961)[33]
• James Madison Award (1998)[14][26]

Bagdikian received honorary degrees, among others, from[26] Brown University (Doctor of Humane Letters, 1961),[82] Clark University (Doctor of Letters, 1963),[19] Berkeley Citation from University of California, Berkeley (equivalent of an honorary degree, 1990),[83][27] University of Rhode Island (Doctor of Letters, 1992).[84] He was the commencement speaker of the 1972 Journalism Convocation of Northwestern University.[85]

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."[86]

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."[87]