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

Ben H. Bagdikian, a journalist and news media critic who became a celebrated voice of conscience for his profession, calling for tougher standards of integrity and public service in an era of changing tastes and technology, died March 11 at his home in Berkeley (CA). He was 96.

Over five decades, Bagdikian was a national and foreign correspondent for newspapers and magazines; a reporter, editor and ombudsman for The Washington Post; the author of eight books; and for many years a professor and the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He was The Washington Post’s conduit for the Pentagon Papers, the secret Defense Department study of decades of American duplicity in Indochina that was disclosed by the military analyst Daniel Ellsberg and published by The Post and The New York Times in 1971 in defiance of the Nixon Administration’s attempts at suppression as the nation debated its deepening involvement in the war in Vietnam. But he was perhaps best known as the author of “The Media Monopoly” (1983), which warned that freedom of expression and independent journalism were threatened by the consolidation of news and entertainment outlets in a shrinking circle of corporate owners. A mere 50 companies, he wrote, controlled what most Americans read in newspapers and books and saw on television and at the movies. By 2004, when he published “The New Media Monopoly,” the last of seven sequel editions, the number of corporate giants controlling much of the flow of information and entertainment had dwindled to five. “This gives each of the five corporations and their leaders more communications power than was exercised by any despot or dictatorship in history,” Bagdikian wrote.