Sydney Schanberg - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sydney Hillel Schanberg (born January 17, 1934 in Clinton, Massachusetts) is an American journalist who is best known for his coverage of the war in Cambodia.
Schanberg joined The New York Times as a journalist in 1959. He spent much of the early 1970s as a Vietnam War 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 U.S. carpet bombing campaigns over Cambodia and Laos, Schanberg wrote positively 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." The Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975 and killed approximately two million people. 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] 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." However, in the same article, Schanberg then went on to reject claims that the communist takeover of Cambodia could lead to state-sponsored genocide: "Wars nourish brutality and sadism, and sometimes certain people are executed by the victors but it would be tendentious to forecast such abnormal behavior as a national policy under a Communist government once the war is over."
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 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. Schanberg 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.
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.

Dith Pran - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dith Pran (September 27, 1942 – March 30, 2008) was a Cambodian photojournalist best known as a refugee and Cambodian Genocide survivor and was the subject of the Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields (1984). He was portrayed in the movie by first-time actor Haing S. Ngor (1940-1996), who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance.

[edit] Biography

Born in Siem Reap (Cambodia), near the Angkor Wat, his father worked as a public-works official.^[1] He learned French at school and taught himself English, so the U.S. Army hired him as a translator.^[1] After ties with the United States were severed, Dith began working with a British film crew, and then as a hotel receptionist.^[1]
In 1975, Pran and New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg stayed behind in Cambodia to cover the fall of the capital Phnom Penh to the communist Khmer Rouge forces.^[1] Schanberg and other foreign reporters were allowed to leave, but Dith was not permitted to leave the country.^[1] Due to the suppression of knowledge during the Genocide, Dith hid the fact that he was educated or that he knew Americans and pretended to be a taxi driver.^[1] When Cambodians were forced to work in labor camps, Dith had to endure four years of starvation and torture before Vietnam overthrew the Khmer Rouge in December 1978.^[1] He coined the phrase "killing fields" to refer to the clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered during his 40-mile escape. His three brothers and sister were killed in Cambodia.
Dith travelled back to Siem Reap, where it was learned that 50 members of his family had died.^[1] The Vietnamese had made him village chief, but Dith escaped to Thailand on October 3, 1979 after fearing that they knew of his American ties.^[1]
From 1980, Dith worked as a photojournalist with The New York Times in the United States. In 1986, he became an American citizen with his then wife, Ser Moeun Dith; they were later divorced. Dith then married Kim DePaul, but they also divorced.^[1] He also campaigned for recognition of the Cambodian Genocide victims, especially as founder and president of The Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project. He was a recipient of an Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 1998 and of The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence.
Dith died on March 30, 2008 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, having been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer just three months earlier. He was living in Woodbridge, New Jersey.^[1][2] Survivors include his companion, Bette Parslow; his daughter, Hemkarey; his sons, Titony, Titonath and Titonel; a sister, Samproeuth; six grandchildren; and two stepgrandchildren