Ben Bagdikian

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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.

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.

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."

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, 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. 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 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."

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."

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.

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