Ben H. Bagdikian, Reporter of Broad Range and Conscience, Dies at 96

“The worst thing that can happen to a journalist is to become a celebrity,” he told The Progressive in 1997. “The honest job of the journalist is to observe, to listen, to learn. The job of the celebrity is to be observed, to make sure others learn about him or her, to be the object of attention rather than an observer.”

Ben Haig Bagdikian was born on January 30, 1920, in Marash, Turkey, the youngest of five children of Aram Bagdikian, a chemistry teacher, and the former Daisy Uvezian. The family fled the massacre of Armenians when Ben was an infant and made its way to America, settling in Stoneham, Mass. His mother died when he was 3, and his father became pastor of an Armenian Congregational church in Cambridge.

He graduated from Clark University in 1941 and worked briefly as a reporter for the Springfield Morning Union in Massachusetts. In 1942 he married Elizabeth Ogasapian. They had two sons, Christopher and Frederick, and were divorced in 1972. His second marriage, to Betty Medsger, ended in divorce. In 1983, he married Marlene Griffith. Besides her, he is survived by Frederick. Christopher died in 2015.

After serving as a navigator in World War II, Bagdikian joined the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin in Rhode Island in 1947. Over the next 15 years he was a local reporter, a member of a team that won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for deadline coverage of a bank robbery, a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and a Washington correspondent.

From 1963 to 1967 he was a Washington-based contributing editor of the Saturday Evening Post and wrote freelance articles about politics, poverty, housing, migration and other subjects for the New York Times Magazine and other publications. He also covered the civil rights movement, sometimes as a companion of victims of intimidation and violence.

His first book, In the Midst of Plenty: The Poor in America, was published in 1964. His other books included The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media (1971), The Effete Conspiracy and Other Crimes by the Press (1972), and a memoir, Double Vision: Reflections on My Heritage, Life and Profession (1995).

Frustrated by the “sins and omissions” of reporters and television crews at news events, he began writing media critiques in the 1960s after formulating a Bagdikian Law of Journalism: “The accuracy of news reports of an event is inversely proportional to the number of reporters on the scene.”

Bagdikian studied the news media for the RAND Corporation from 1967 to 1969. After joining the Washington Post in 1970, he became an assistant managing editor and the ombudsman, representing the newspaper’s readers. From 1972 to 1974, he wrote for t he Columbia Journalism Review. He taught journalism at Berkeley from 1976 until retiring in 1990, and was the graduate school’s dean from 1985 to 1988.

“Never forget,” he told his students at the outset, “that your obligation is to the people. It is not, at heart, to those who pay you, or to your editor, or to your sources, or to your friends, or to the advancement of your career. It is to the public.”