Ben Bagdikian, Visionary

Jeff Cohen
Fairness and Accuracy In Media FAIR, March 12, 2016

EXCERPT...

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.

SNIP...

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.

SOURCE: http://fair.org/home/ben-bagdikian-visionary/

Additional info on corporate owned news:

http://www.corporations.org/media/

https://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media/MediaMonopoly_Bagdikian.html