BERKELEY, CA (AP) — Ben H. Bagdikian, a renowned journalist, newspaper executive, media critic and professor who helped publish the Pentagon Papers and for decades was a passionate voice for journalistic integrity, has died. He was 96.

His wife, Marlene Griffith Bagdikian, said he died Friday morning at his home in Berkeley.

His five-decade career in journalism was adventurous. In the 1950s he covered the civil rights struggle, including the Little Rock school integration crisis, and rode with an Israeli tank crew during the Suez crisis.

In the 1970s, he obtained the Pentagon Papers — a secret history of U.S. strategy and involvement in Vietnam — for the Washington Post from Daniel Ellsberg.

In 1976 Bagdikian joined the journalism faculty at UC Berkeley. He later became dean of the graduate school of journalism, retiring in 1990.

“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,” The New York Times notes.

Ben Haig Bagdikian was born on Jan. 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.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Sign Up for Our Newsletters

Get notified of the latest updates from MassisPost.

You May Also Like

Armenia’s 1000 Largest Corporate Taxpayers Paid About 1.5 Trillion Drams In Taxes In 2022

YEREVAN — Armenia’s 1000 largest corporate taxpayers paid one trillion 490 billion…

Trilingual Atlas of Artsakh Published

YEREVAN (Armradio) — The trilingual atlas of Artsakh prepared by the Duty…

Primate’s Christmas Message

“Let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit,…

Nagorno-Karabakh Originally Belonged to Armenia and Has Always Been Inhabited Mainly by Armenians. International Human Rights Lawyer Geoffrey Robertson

International human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson published an article in The Independent…