Ben Bagdikian

Ben Bagdikian
Birth name	Ben Bagdikian
Nationality	Armenian-American

Ben Haig Bagdikian (born 1920, Maraş, Ottoman Empire; modern day Turkey) is an American educator and journalist. Bagdikian has made journalism his profession since 1941. He is a significant American media critic and the dean emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. 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 (through 2000) before being renamed The New Media Monopoly and is considered a crucial resource for knowledge about media ownership. Bagdikian is credited with 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."

In 1971, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg gave Bagdikian — then an editor at the Washington Post — 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.

Bibliography

• In the Midst of Plenty: A New Report on the Poor in America, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
• The Information Machines: Their impact on Men and the Media, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, ISBN 0-06-090258-2
• The Effete Conspiracy and Other Crime by the Press, New York: Harper, 1974. ISBN 0-06-090343-0
• Caged: Eight Prisoners & Their Keepers, New York: Harper, 1976. ISBN 0-06-010174-1
• The Media Monopoly, Boston: Beacon Press, 1983. ISBN 0-8070-6179-4
  • New Edition with extensions The New Media Monopoly, Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8070-6187-5
• Double Vision: Reflections on My Heritage, Life, and Profession, Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. ISBN 0-8070-7066-1

Honors

Mother Jones, a nonprofit 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.

Among Bagdikian’s awards have been the Peabody Award (broadcasting’s “Pulitzer”) for research and critiques of broadcast commentary; 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.

As editor

• "Man's Contracting World in an Expanding Universe", Proceedings of the Brown University Convocation held in Providence, RI October 21–23, 1959, Brown University, 1960.
• "The Shame Of The Prisons", The Washington Post national report, with Leon Dash, 1972.
• The Memoir of Lydia Bagdikian, by Lydia Bagdikian, Berkeley, California: Private printing. Based on notebook diaries of Ben Bagdikian's older sister Lydia, 1997.

External links

• Bagdikian's ZNet HomePage. Includes Znet commentaries by him, and Znet articles by or about Ben Bagdikian.
• Bagdikian's biography at The Library of Americas' Reporting Civil Rights web site
• Bagdikian's biography at the Harvard Square Library's Notable American Unitarians web site
• Bagdikian's articles at FindArticles.com
• Beacon Press web site for New Media Monopoly.
• PBS interview about Media Monopoly