Via Jonathan via
WRSA via SFC Barry
Sydney H. Schanberg, center, in Cambodia, August 1973
The death on Saturday of Sydney Schanberg at age 82 should sadden us
not only for the loss of one of our most renowned journalists but also
for what his story reveals about the nature of our national media.
Syd had
made his career at the
New York Times
for 26 years, winning a Pulitzer Prize, two George Polk Memorial
awards, and numerous other honors. His passing received the notice it
deserved, with the world’s most prestigious broadsheet devoting
nearly a full page
of its Sunday edition to his obituary, a singular honor that in this
degraded era is more typically reserved for leading pop stars or sports
figures. Several photos were included of his Cambodia reporting, which
had become the basis for the Oscar-winning film
The Killing Fields, one of Hollywood’s most memorable accounts of our disastrous Indo-Chinese War.
But for all the 1,300 words and numerous images charting his long and
illustrious journalistic history, not even a single mention was made of
the biggest story of his career, which has seemingly vanished down the
memory hole without trace. And therein lies a tale.
Could a news story ever be “too big” for the media to cover?
More @
The Unz Review
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Last week America suffered the loss of Sydney Schanberg,
widely regarded as one of the greatest journalists of his generation. Yet as I’d
previously noted, when I read
his long and glowing obituary in the
New York Times, I was shocked to see that it included not a single word concerning the greatest story of his career, which had been the
primary focus of the last quarter century of his research and writing.
The cynical abandonment of hundreds of American POWs at the end of
the Vietnam War must surely rank as one of the most monumental scandals
of modern times, and the determined effort of the mainstream media to
maintain this enormous governmental cover-up for over four decades
raises serious doubts about whether we can believe what our newspapers
report about anything else.