Double Vision: Reflections on My Heritage, Life, and Profession.

• Author: McChesney, Robert W.
• Position: Brief Article

Ben Bagdikian opens his memoir with a riveting thirty-three-page account of The Washington Post's decision to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971. As the Post's assistant managing editor, Bagdikian was the newspaper's contact with Daniel Ellsberg, the man who made the papers available to the press. In Bagdikian's narrative, one can clearly see the traits that mark a great journalist.

Bagdikian uses much of Double Vision to reflect upon the changes in U.S. journalism over the past half-century. He develops many of the points he made in his seminal work, The Media Monopoly, the landmark book of left-liberal media criticism which has enjoyed four editions since 1983. In Double Vision, Bagdikian personalizes his argument that U.S. journalism is profoundly and negatively influenced by the implicit pressures of advertisers and corporate media owners. It is a journalism chock full of stories chronicling welfare fraud and petty crime while studiously avoiding stories critical of capitalism and the profit system. It is a journalism where the range of legitimate debate is restricted to the range of elite opinion. As Bagdikian argues, it is a highly flawed journalism for a democratic society.

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