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.
Review
Reporter, editor, professor, and media critic Ben Bagdikian has done it all, and in Double Vision he gives readers a gripping and penetrating story of courage, wisdom, and integrity. —Ralph Nader
"In times when it is easy to lose sight of our historical markers, Ben Bagdikian has provided a delightful memoir certain to inspire." —Robert W. McChesney, The Progressive
"Rooted in the specific details of place, event, personality, remembrance. . . . Double Vision offers an affirmative vision that will stimulate the minds and touch the hearts of its readers." —John Dizikes, San Francisco Chronicle
"Compassionate, funny, gripping, warm, wise. . . . [Ben Bagdikian] is a national treasure." —Morton Mintz, The Nation
"Rich in both revelation and self-revelation. . . . A readable and rewarding book." —Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Washington Post
About the Author
Ben H. Bagdikian has been a Washington bureau chief and foreign correspondent for the Providence Journal, an assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, and a dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.
