- Sydney Schanberg
Sydney Hillel Schanberg (born
January 17 ,1934 inClinton, Massachusetts ) is an Americanjournalist who is best known for his coverage of the war inCambodia .Schanberg joined "
The New York Times " as a journalist in 1959. He spent much of the early 1970's as aVietnam War correspondent for "Times". For his reporting, he won the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism twice, in 1971 and 1974.Before the
Khmer Rouge took overCambodia in 1975 and killed approximately 2 million people, Schanberg wrote positively in "The New York Times" about the coming regime change, writing about the Cambodians that "it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." A dispatch he wrote on April 13, 1975, written fromPhnom Penh , ran with the headline "Indochina without Americans: for most, a better life." [ [http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/1998/04/30/american_leftists_were_pol_pots_cheerleaders/ "American leftists were Pol Pot's cheerleaders"] ,Jeff Jacoby , April 30, 1998] However, in the same piece, Schanberg also wrote, "This is not to say that the Communist-backed governments which will replace the American clients can be expected to be benevolent. Already, in Cambodia, there is evidence in the areas led by the Communist-led Cambodian insurgents that life is hard and inflexible, everything that Cambodians are not."He won the
1976 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his Cambodia coverage.His 1980 book "The Death and Life of Dith Pran", was about the struggle for survival of his assistant
Dith Pran in theKhmer Rouge regime. The book inspired the 1984 film "The Killing Fields", in which Schanberg was played bySam Waterston .Between 1986 and 1995, he was an associate editor and columnist for "
New York Newsday ".In
1992 , Schanberg received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honoraryDoctor of Laws degree fromColby College .In 2006, Schanberg resigned as the "Press Clips" columnist for The "
Village Voice " in protest over the editorial, political and personnel changes made by the new publisher,New Times Media .Bibliography
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*References
External links
* [http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/13/145245 "Village Voice Shakeup: Top Investigative Journalist Fired, Prize-Winning Writers Resign Following Merger with New Times Media"]
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