Ben Bagdikian Told the Truth and Stood Strong

Photo of Ben Bagdikian from the Washington Post, where he helped break the Pentagon Papers and Watergate stories.

From Day One, no journalist more influenced FAIR’s standard media critique than Ben Bagdikian. The first edition of his Media Monopoly was our bible. Ben joined our advisory board as soon as we assembled one in 1986; he wrote our first cover story in Extra! (6/87). He was a kind and supportive uncle to FAIR during those early years.

No group followed the Bagdikian Number (the ever-shrinking number of corporations that controlled a majority of media revenue) more avidly than FAIR. It was to FAIR what the “Doomsday Clock” was to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. With every new mega-merger, we would say, “Life imitates Ben.”

Before almost anyone else, Ben warned about the impact of the modern wave of media mergers that accelerated during the Reagan years (and accelerated further during the Clinton administration). In the first years of FAIR, I heard from various sympathetic journalists in mainstream media who said they were thrilled that, finally, a pro–working journalist media watch group had formed…but that we were off-base to emphasize the impact of corporate owners—that the problem was in the newsroom far more than the boardroom. A few years and a few mergers later, these same journalists told us that we’d been right, almost prophetic—that boardrooms were undermining journalism, often quite nakedly.

But we weren’t the visionaries. It was Ben Bagdikian who was the seer.

Ben was a journalist’s journalist—from his years as a local reporter to his years at the Washington Post (where he played a crucial role in publishing the Pentagon Papers and went undercover as an inmate in a maximum-security prison). He served the public, not the boardroom—and luckily for him, he got out of corporate media before the conglomerate era.

Every semester in my journalism class at Ithaca College, I screen the Oscar-nominated documentary, Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press. The star of that movie is Ben Bagdikian, holding forth on what real journalists do: How they buck trends. How they don’t countenance demagogues like Sen. Joe McCarthy (or today, by implication, Donald Trump).

Ben’s motto through all these decades could have been: “Tell the Truth and Stand Strong.”

The New York Times obit for Ben (3/11/16) quotes his message to his journalism students at UC Berkeley:

Never forget 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.

Jeff Cohen is the founder of FAIR. He’s now the founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College.

‘Those Who Can Tell Us What’s Going On Have a Stake in Not Telling Us What’s Going On’

Excerpts from Janine Jackson’s CounterSpin interview with Ben Bagdikian (8/5/95):

JJ: People have been saying, Well, what exactly is wrong with so-called vertical integration? What’s wrong with having the same entity control the distribution network and the programming or the content? What’s the danger involved there?

BB: If you control the gate to the only well in town, you can charge whatever you want, or you can deny access to whomever you want. You can have the dirtiest water at the highest prices, and there will be very little choice.

JJ: What about the concrete effects on news coverage?

BB: We’ve already had a demonstration that a big company with many interests that owns a news outlet, that they are very conscious of what the news says about them. The owners can have an effect and usually have not been loathe to try to control it, either by individual items or getting rid of an executive in charge of news who doesn’t remember that one hand washes the other in corporate life, and a broadcasting operation washes the hand of the owning corporation.

JJ: What’s your response to the notion that these current media mergers are going on with no protest whatsoever?

BB: There are protests by various consumer groups and others who are concerned with diversity in the society and the media. But they don’t seem to make much of a headline in the standard news, which is what notifies the public that there’s a problem. Increasingly we’re trapped, because those who can tell us what’s going on have a stake in not telling us what’s going on, or what its consequences may be.