An Interview with Chris Hedges

By David Barsamian, August 2011 issue

Q: You gave the commencement address at a college in Illinois two months after Bush launched the Iraq War. That rubbed your editors at The New York Times the wrong way. Why?

Hedges: Because I was booed off the stage. The Progressive actually ran a transcript of the whole talk with what people shouted in brackets. The Times editors were pressured to respond, and they responded by calling me into the office and giving me a formal written reprimand for impugning the impartiality of The New York Times. We were members of the Newspaper Guild, and the process is that you give the employee a written warning and then, under Guild rules, the next time the employee violates that warning, you can fire them. So once I was handed that written warning, it was terminal, because I wasn’t about to stop speaking out against the Iraq War. I approached Hamilton Fish at the Nation Institute about becoming a senior fellow there and leaving the Times. I did leave the Times; I wasn’t fired. But if I had stayed long enough, I would have been fired. That was inevitable.