Ben-hur Haig Bagdikian (January 30, 1920 – March 11, 2016) was an American journalist, news media critic and commentator, and university professor. An Armenian genocide survivor, he moved to the United States as an infant and began a journalism career after serving in World War II. He worked as a local reporter, investigative journalist and foreign correspondent for The Providence Journal. During his time there, Bagdikian won a Peabody Award and a Pulitzer Prize. In 1971, he received parts of the Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg and successfully persuaded The Washington Post to publish them despite objections and threats from the Richard Nixon administration. He later taught at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and served as its dean from 1985 to 1988.
Bagdikian was a critic of the news media. His 1983 book The Media Monopoly, warning about the growing concentration of corporate ownership of news organizations, went through several editions and influenced, among others, Noam Chomsky. He 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.
Personal life Background Ben-Hur Haig Bagdikian, born in Marash, Ottoman Empire, on January 30, 1920, was the fifth and youngest child of Armenian parents Aram Toros "Theodore" Bagdikian (1882−1957) and Dudeh "Daisy" Uvezian (1886−1923). He had four sisters. 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. 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. His family knew English well. His father also spoke Armenian, Turkish, Arabic, and learned the Biblical languages.
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, 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. 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. When Bagdikian was three years old his mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis almost immediately after arrival in Boston and died three years later, after spending some time hospitalized in sanatoriums.
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." He described himself as an "Armenian overlaid by, of all things, the culture of New England Yankee."
Religion 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.
Education and military service 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. He graduated from Stoneham High School in 1937. He thereafter attended Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, as a pre-medical student. 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.() Having taken many chemistry courses he sought to apply for a job as a chemist upon graduating from Clark in 1941. He had the opportunity to work as a lab assistant at Monsanto in Springfield, Massachusetts.
He served as a navigator (first lieutenant) in the United States Army Air Forces from May 1942 to January 1946. He had volunteered to join the Air Forces immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Marriages 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. His second marriage, to Betty Medsger, a Washington Post reporter, ended in divorce as well. His third wife was Marlene Griffith (born Marie Helene Ungar in Vienna), whom he married in 1983.
Death 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.
During his college years Bagdikian worked as a reporter for the Worcester Gazette and Springfield Morning Union. After World War II he briefly joined the staff of Flying Traveler, a magazine for private flying in New York.
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 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. Bagdikian later described the paper as one of the better papers, besides their pro-Republican and anti-union editorials.
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 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, 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."
The 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 and former RAND Corporation colleague, who in a Boston-area motel 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. Bagdikian flew with the Papers to Washington, where he physically presented them in large boxes to executive editor Ben Bradlee at the latter's home; he also gave the Papers to US Senator Mike Gravel on June 26 in front of the Mayflower Hotel. 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 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."
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 in 1972 and later as a book (1976).
Bagdikian left the Post in August 1972 after clashing with Bradlee "as a conduit of outside and internal complaints."
UC Berkeley Bagdikian wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review from 1972 to 1974. 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. He was the dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism from 1985 to 1988. He was named Professor Emeritus upon departure.
Media criticism
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 reporters, 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."