When I think of newspaper journalists who became authors and had enormous impacts on media criticism in the United States, two names come to mind.
One is George Seldes. As a young man, he covered the First World War and then reported on historic events in Europe for the Chicago Tribune from
1919 until 1928. Seldes quit the paper and went on to blaze a trail as an independent journalist -- ready, able and eager to challenge media business-as-usual. Naturally, he earned hostility from the kind of media magnates he skewered in "Lords of the Press." The renowned historian Charles A. Beard called that 1938 book “a grand job.”
Forty-five years later, another emigre from newsrooms wrote a book that turned out to have profound effects on critical thinking about media. When "The Media Monopoly" first appeared in 1983, the media establishment and many of its employees shrugged; if they paid any attention, it was usually
just long enough to dismiss Ben Bagdikian's warning about consolidation of media ownership as alarmist...
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