| Sydney Schanberg | |
|---|---|
| Born | Sydney Hillel Schanberg January 17, 1934 Clinton, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Occupation | Journalist |
Sydney Hillel Schanberg (born January 17, 1934) is an American journalist who is best known for his coverage of the war in Cambodia.
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Schanberg joined The New York Times as a journalist in 1959. He spent much of the early 1970s in Southeast Asia as a correspondent for the Times. For his reporting, he won the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism twice, in 1971 and 1974.
Following years of combat, Schanberg wrote in The New York Times about the departure of the Americans and 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 from Phnom Penh, ran with the headline "Indochina without Americans: for most, a better life."[1]
The Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975 and killed approximately two million people.
He was one of the few American journalists to remain behind in Phnom Penh after the city fell.
He won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his Cambodia coverage.
He was New York Times Metropolitan Editor, and Op-Ed columnist.[2] His 1980 book The Death and Life of Dith Pran was about the struggle for survival of his assistant Dith Pran in the Khmer Rouge regime. The book inspired the 1984 film The Killing Fields, in which Schanberg was played by Sam Waterston.
Between 1986 and 1995, he was an associate editor and columnist for New York Newsday. He covered the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs hearings and became engrossed in the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue; writing for Penthouse and later The Village Voice and The Nation, Schanberg became a leading advocate of the "live prisoners" belief in that matter.
In 1992, Schanberg received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College. He worked as head of investigations for APBNews.com, that won a 1999 Investigative Reporters and Editors award.[3]
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.[4]
In the July 1st, 2010 issue of American Conservative, Schanberg wrote an article about his struggle to reveal the truth about the United States government leaving behind hundreds of POWs being held by North Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam War.[5][6]