Double Vision: Reflections on My Heritage, Life, and Profession - Hardcover

Bagdikian, Ben Haig

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807070661 ISBN 13: 9780807070666

Publisher: Beacon Press (MA), 1995

Synopsis

Bagdikian's book spans the human gamut, from the time of his birth when he was almost left for dead during a massacre of Armenians in Turkey to his becoming an editor of a leading American daily and a dean of the School of Journalism at Berkeley.

About this title

Review:

Strong evidence of the seductive power of the establishment press is that few folks who've worked in it at a level of real responsibility ever leave, much less leave to become press critics. A notable exception is Ben Bagdikian, who after rising through the ranks of several papers to become assistant managing editor of the Washington Post chucked it all to become a journalism professor. While in that job he produced a trenchant, prescient book about the rise of the media conglomerate, The Media Monopoly. Double Vision, as the title suggests, is really two projects: one, an autobiography; the other, the updating of Bagdikian's take on various journalistic behaviors and problems. Both agendas work because Bagdikian has had an interesting life and continues to have interesting ideas. So in this book we are entertained by tales of the Army Air Corps in World War II and of working on the Pentagon Papers, and are instructed by a cogent critique of the way the big papers (don't) cover big business.

From the Back Cover:

Bagdikian's book spans the human gamut, from the time of his birth when he was almost left for dead during a massacre of Armenians in Turkey to his becoming an editor of a leading American daily and a dean of the School of Journalism at Berkeley. As a child, Bagdikian lived in two worlds - the world of his puritanical clergyman-father, whose parish was in a small New England town, and the world of his truck-driver uncle and his grandfather who made bathtub beer during Prohibition. Bagdikian had to attend church regularly but he made money for college tuition on a boardwalk with friends who were pitchmen and gamblers. As a professional journalist, Bagdikian continued his insider-outsider roles - his double vision - as one of the country's leading journalists and as a leading critic of his own profession. An enemy of secrecy in government, as editor at the Washington Post Bagdikian obtained and was instrumental in overcoming governmental censorship in publishing the secret "Pentagon Papers" on the Vietnam War.

About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Press (MA)
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0807070661
• ISBN 13: 9780807070666
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 241