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

Ben Haig Bagdikian (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0807070661 | ISBN-13: 978-0807070666 | Publication Date: August 1995

This dramatic memoir by one of America's most respected journalists and media critics takes us from the author's narrow escape from a Turkish massacre of Armenians as a young child, to his secret acquisition of the Pentagon Papers, to the transformation of American journalism over the last half century.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Amiable but diffuse, this collection of reminiscences by one of the country's best-known media critics intrigues in places but also leaves the reader wanting more. Bagdikian (The Media Monopoly), former dean of the UC Berkeley journalism school, begins with an account of his cloak-and-dagger acquisition of the Pentagon Papers for the Washington Post and the in-house debate about publishing them, then skates over his career, which began at the Springfield Morning Union in Massachusetts. "Journalists are both insiders and outsiders," he states, buttressing his title, and large chunks of the book consist of family tales. His Armenian family survived a Turkish massacre; that experience stirred his father's patriotism and scarred their collective memory; other relatives helped Bagdikian learn to "view events from the bottom." The author makes good points along the way?suggesting that news is influenced less by liberalism than by business conservatism?but his rich life and career could have produced a deeper valedictory.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 241 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (MA) (August 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807070661
• ISBN-13: 978-0807070666
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,418,570 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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