Ben Bagdikian

Biography

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.

In 1976, Bagdikian joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, eventually becoming the dean of the graduate school of journalism there. He retired in 1990.

In 1983 Bagdikian published The Media Monopoly, which revealed the fast-moving media conglomeration that was putting more and more media corporations in fewer and fewer hands with each new merger. This work has been updated through six editions before being renamed The New Media Monopoly (2004) and is considered a crucial resource for knowledge about media ownership. Bagdikian is credited with having made the observation that "Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's 'St. Matthew Passion' on a ukulele."

Bagdikian died in Berkeley, California on March 11, 2016 at the age of 96.

Awards and honors

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.

Mother Jones, a nonprofit magazine and news organization that specializes in investigative, political, and social justice reporting, has created a program after Bagdikian called the Ben Bagdikian Fellowship Program for interns aspiring to become investigative reporters.

He received an honorary L.H.D. degree from Brown University in 1961.

Bagdikian was posthumously inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in October 2016.

Among Bagdikian’s other awards have been: a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship; a Citation of Merit as “Journalism’s Most Perceptive Critic,” awarded by the American Society of Journalism School Administrators; and the James Madison Award, by the American Library Association Coalition on Government Information. His honorary degrees are from Brown University, University of Rhode Island, and his alma mater, Clark University. He has also received The Berkeley Citation, the equivalent of honorary degrees given at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a faculty member and Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism. He is the recipient of the James Madison Award of the American Library Association Coalition on Government Information.