Why Chris Hedges Left the New York Times: One Speech and a Written Reprimand

Two months into the Iraq war, Chris Hedges walked to the lectern at the Rockford College commencement in Illinois and opened with one sentence:

I want to speak to you today about war and empire.

He got roughly three minutes before somebody unplugged the microphone. What followed, in front of about 2,000 people including 400 graduates, was booing, foghorns, chanting, backs turned, a second cut to the sound system, an appeal from the college president for academic freedom followed by his suggestion that Hedges wrap it up, and finally graduates in robes trying to climb onto the platform to confront him. Hedges ended the speech at eighteen minutes and campus security walked him off the grounds. The date was May 17, 2003.

What he had been saying when the sound died was that the occupation ahead would cost the country its standing and its alliances, and that prosecuting a war on terror alongside Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon had already cost it something. “We have become the company we keep,” he told the graduates.

That is the part people remember. The consequence arrived from New York. The New York Times, which had employed him for thirteen years by then and had shared a Pulitzer Prize with him the year before, handed him a written reprimand telling him to stop speaking publicly about the war. He did not stop. He was gone from the paper by 2005.

What the reprimand actually was

Hedges has told this part the same way for years. Interviewed by Paul Jay of The Real News Network in July 2013, he said the paper called him in and gave him “a formal written reprimand for impugning the impartiality of The New York Times.”

The mechanism mattered more than the wording. Hedges was covered by a Newspaper Guild contract, and he described the process plainly in that interview: the employer issues the reprimand in written form, and the next time the employee violates it, the guild rules permit firing. One more speech and the Times could have ended his job on paperwork it had already filed.

The paper’s side of this has been reported as a matter of impartiality, that public remarks by a reporter could undermine public trust in the coverage. It was, in 2003, an ordinary position for an American newsroom: the correspondent who covers a war does not take sides on it in public. Hedges had run the paper’s Middle East bureau, spoke Arabic, and had been publicly critical of the invasion before Rockford. Those same facts sat on both sides of the argument depending on who was making it.

He chose the speaking. “I was going to be proactive,” he told Jay. “I was going to arrange for a transition to get out before I was fired, but it was clear that I was going to be fired.” He left in 2005 for the Nation Institute, where the constraint did not exist.

American history has a rougher version of the same collision. Eugene Debs got ten years in a federal penitentiary under the Espionage Act for an antiwar speech in Ohio in 1918. Hedges got a piece of paper in a personnel file. Both men were told, in the vocabulary available to the institution doing the telling, to stop talking.

Divinity school, then El Salvador

Hedges was born on September 18, 1956 in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, the son of a Presbyterian minister. He took an English degree at Colgate and went to Harvard Divinity School, finishing a master of divinity in 1983 with every intention of being ordained. He also had a one-way ticket to El Salvador, where by his own account a United States-backed military government was killing between 700 and 1,000 people a month, and he wanted the church to recognize reporting from there as his ministry. Writing about it in 2014, he explained what the church decided:

going to El Salvador as a reporter was not something the Presbyterian Church at the time recognized as a valid ministry, and a committee rejected my ‘call.’

His father’s response to the rejection was to tell him he was “ordained to write.” He went to Central America anyway, freelancing for The Christian Science Monitor and NPR before becoming Central America bureau chief for The Dallas Morning News from 1984 to 1988. The New York Times hired him in 1990. Over the next fifteen years he ran the paper’s Middle East bureau and then its Balkans bureau during the wars in Yugoslavia, and his reporting career took him through more than fifty countries.

In 2002 two things arrived at once. He was part of the Times staff whose coverage of global terrorism took that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, and Amnesty International gave him its Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.

The book that made him famous

PublicAffairs published War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning in September 2002, and it became the book most readers know him for. It reads as a correspondent’s account of why war works on the people inside it, himself included. War supplies purpose, clarity, and a cause worth dying for, which is what makes it so hard to give up. On the conflicts he had just spent a decade covering, he wrote:

The ethnic conflicts and insurgencies of our time, whether between Serbs and Muslims or Hutus and Tutsis, are not religious wars. They are not clashes between cultures or civilizations, nor are they the result of ancient ethnic hatreds. They are manufactured wars, born out of the collapse of civil societies, perpetuated by fear, greed, and paranoia, and they are run by gangsters, who rise up from the bottom of their own societies and terrorize all, including those they purport to protect.

The National Book Critics Circle made it a finalist for general nonfiction in 2002, in a field Samantha Power won with A Problem from Hell, and the book has since sold more than 400,000 copies. Eight months after it came out, a college in Illinois booked its author to send four hundred graduates into the world, which suggests nobody on the invitation committee read past the title.

After the paper

The second act has been busier than the first. Hedges wrote a column at Truthdig for years, published books at a steady clip, and in January 2012 sued the president of the United States. Hedges v. Obama challenged section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, the provision authorizing indefinite military detention of people who “substantially support” al-Qaeda or associated forces, on the grounds that the wording was vague enough to reach journalists and activists. His co-plaintiffs included Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky. Judge Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York agreed and struck the provision down in September 2012. The Second Circuit reversed her in July 2013 on the ground that the plaintiffs lacked standing, and the Supreme Court declined to take the case in April 2014.

He teaches college-credit courses inside New Jersey prisons, with classes that mix incarcerated students and undergraduates, work he had already been doing for several years by 2014. On October 5, 2014, three decades after the committee turned him down, a church in Elizabeth, New Jersey ordained him as a minister, and his own account of that Sunday puts the prison teaching at the center of the case for it.

The plagiarism allegations

One stretch of the record is contested, and leaving it out would be its own kind of edit. In June 2014 The New Republic published an article by Christopher Ketcham alleging that Hedges had reused other writers’ language without credit, starting with a 2010 manuscript in which a fact-checker at Harper’s found passages tracking a 2009 story by the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Matt Katz. Ketcham reported a wider pattern involving other authors.

The magazine ran Hedges’s reply on June 17. He called the allegations false and said they were meant to damage him personally and professionally, wrote that a charge of plagiarism was “at once shocking and unwarranted,” and argued that “the final, published material is what counts.” He said inquiries by the Nation Institute, Nation Books and Truthdig had all found no basis for the charges. The New Republic appended its own note disputing his account of how the piece was reported, including his claim that it went unchecked. Both statements sit on the same page, and a reader can weigh them there.

Deleted again, in 2022

From 2016 Hedges hosted On Contact, an interview show, for RT America, the United States arm of the Russian state-funded network. In the spring of 2022, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine underway, YouTube removed the program’s entire six-year archive. He learned about it the way viewers did. “There was no notice,” he told Democracy Now on April 1, 2022. “There was no warning. There was no inquiry. It just vanished.”

Hold the two erasures next to each other and the mechanisms are opposites. In 2003 an employer wrote him a letter and put it in a file. In 2022 a platform pressed a button and told nobody. Rockford is the odd one out, because the crowd that shouted him down lost: the microphone went dead twice that afternoon, and the transcript of all eighteen minutes is public, posted by the local paper that covered the graduation and reprinted since. It opens with the sentence that started the trouble.