Ben Baghdikian was a prominent Armenian-American journalist who left a great mark in his field with his exemplary work, winning the Pulitzer Prize and the Peabody Award.

A descendant of the survivors of the genocide committed against the Armenians, he was born in Marash during the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. As a child, he and his family survived the massacre and moved to the United States. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor during World War II, he enlisted in the US Air Force, serving until the end of the war.

Ben Baghdikian began his career as a journalist after the war and started working at the Washington Post newspaper. Over time, Baghdikian became the paper’s deputy local news editor and helped publicize the Pentagon Papers.

Leaving the field of daily news, he focused on broader affairs and published the landmark book The Media Monopoly, in which he showed how a few American organizations took control of most of the news industry. Although he has published other books as well, he is now best known for this and subsequent works in “The New Media Monopoly.”

During his professional career, Ben Baghdikian has also served as a professor and honorary dean of the School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley