Sydney Schanberg

Sydney Hillel Schanberg (born January 17, 1934 in Clinton, Massachusetts) is an American journalist who is best known for his coverage of the war in Cambodia.

Schanberg joined The New York Times as a journalist in 1959. He spent much of the early 1970's as a Vietnam War correspondent for Times. For his reporting, he won the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism twice, in 1971 and 1974.

Before the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975 and killed approximately 2 million people, Schanberg wrote positively in The New York Times about the coming regime change, writing about the Cambodians that "it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." A dispatch he wrote on April 13, 1975, written from Phnom Penh, ran with the headline "Indochina without Americans: for most, a better life."

He won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his Cambodia coverage.

His 1980 book The Death and Life of Dith Pran, was about the struggle for survival of his assistant Dith Pran in the Khmer Rouge regime. The book inspired the 1984 film The Killing Fields, in which Schanberg was played by Sam Waterston.

Between 1986 and 1995, he was an associate editor and columnist for New York Newsday.

In 1992, Schanberg received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College.

In 2006, Schanberg resigned as the Press Clips columnist for The Village Voice in protest over the editorial, political and personnel changes made by the new publisher, New Times Media.

Bibliography

• Schanberg, Sydney (1980). The Death and Life of Dith Pran. Penguin. ISBN 0140084576.
• Schanberg, Sydney (1984). The Killing Fields: The Facts Behind The Film. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.