Christopher Lynn Hedges was born on September 18,1956 and is an American journalist, author, commentator and Presbyterian minister.
68 Facts About Chris Hedges
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In 2001, Chris Hedges contributed to The New York Times staff entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism.
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Chris Hedges produced a weekly column for Truthdig for 14 years until the outlet's hiatus in 2020.
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Chris Hedges's books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction; American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America ; Death of the Liberal Class ; and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, written with cartoonist Joe Sacco.
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Chris Hedges hosted the television program On Contact for RT America from 2016 to 2022.
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Christopher Lynn Hedges was born on September 18,1956 in St Johnsbury, Vermont.
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Chris Hedges's father was a World War II veteran, Presbyterian minister, and anti-war activist.
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Chris Hedges was raised in rural Schoharie County, New York, southwest of Albany.
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Chris Hedges received a scholarship to attend Loomis Chaffee School, a private boarding school in Windsor, Connecticut.
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Chris Hedges founded an underground newspaper at the school that was banned by the administration and resulted in his being put on probation.
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Chris Hedges enrolled into Colgate University and, though heterosexual, helped found an LGBT student group.
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Chris Hedges received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Colgate in 1979.
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Chris Hedges sought a postgraduate education at Harvard University's Divinity School where he studied under James Luther Adams in addition to studying classics and Classical Greek.
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Chris Hedges gained an interest in pursuing journalism as a means of furthering ministry after a period of close communications with British journalist Robert Cox, who was at that time reporting on the Dirty War in Argentina.
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Chris Hedges made some freelance contributions for The Washington Post, and later covered the Falklands War from Buenos Aires for National Public Radio using equipment given to him by NPR reporter William Buzenberg.
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Chris Hedges returned to the United States to complete a Master of Divinity degree at Harvard in 1983.
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Chris Hedges continued his career as a freelance journalist in Latin America.
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Chris Hedges was hired as the Central America Bureau Chief for The Dallas Morning News in 1984 and held this position until 1988.
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Chris Hedges was appointed the Middle East Bureau Chief for The Dallas Morning News in 1989.
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Chris Hedges covered the first Gulf War for the paper, where he refused to participate in the military pool system that restricted the movement and reporting of journalists.
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Chris Hedges was arrested by the United States Army and had his press credentials revoked, but continued to defy the military restrictions to report outside the pool system.
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Chris Hedges subsequently entered Kuwait with US Marine Corps members who were distrustful of the Army's press control.
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Chris Hedges was appointed the paper's Middle East Bureau Chief in 1991.
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Chris Hedges's reporting on the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein in the Kurdish-held parts of northern Iraq saw the Iraqi leader offer a bounty for anyone who killed Hedges, along with other western journalists and aid workers in the region.
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In 1995, Chris Hedges was named the Balkan Bureau Chief for The New York Times.
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Chris Hedges was based in Sarajevo when the city was being hit by over 300 shells a day by the surrounding Bosnia Serbs.
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Chris Hedges reported on the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995 and shortly after the war uncovered what appeared to be one of the central collection points and hiding places for perhaps thousands of corpses at the large open pit Ljubija mine during the Bosnian Serbs' ethnic cleansing campaign.
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Chris Hedges ended his career of reporting in active conflicts in October 2000.
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Chris Hedges was a member of a New York Times investigative team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting in 2002 for their coverage of Al Qaeda.
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Chris Hedges received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002.
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Chris Hedges' contribution to the Times award was an October 2001 article describing Al Qaeda's foiled bombing plot of the Embassy of the United States, Paris.
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Chris Hedges worked on the behalf of Lowell Bergman of Frontline, who could not travel to Beirut to interview the purported defectors.
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The trip was organized by Ahmed Chalabi, who Chris Hedges considered to be unreliable.
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Chris Hedges consulted the US Embassy in Turkey to confirm their identity, and the embassy falsely did so as the real al-Ghurairy had never left Iraq.
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Chris Hedges wrote a November 8,2001 Times cover story about two former Iraqi military commanders who claimed to have trained foreign mujahedeen how to hijack planes and destroy vital American infrastructure.
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In 2003, Chris Hedges gave a commencement speech at the graduation ceremony for Rockford College in which he criticized the ongoing American invasion of Iraq.
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Chris Hedges's speech was received with boos, and his microphone was shut off three minutes after he began speaking.
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Chris Hedges cited this reprimand as a motivation for resigning from the Times in 2005.
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In 2005, Chris Hedges became a senior fellow at Type Media Center, and a columnist at Truthdig, in addition to writing books and teaching inmates at a New Jersey correctional institution.
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In 2006, Chris Hedges was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Nonfiction.
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Chris Hedges produced a weekly column in Truthdig for 14 years.
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Chris Hedges was fired along with all of the editorial staff in March 2020.
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Chris Hedges resumed work with Scheer after the launch of Scheerpost.
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The Washington Free Beacon reported that a spokesperson for The New York Times said it "did not have reason to believe Chris Hedges plagiarized in his work for the paper" and had no plans to investigate Chris Hedges for plagiarism.
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Chris Hedges has worked for a decade teaching writing classes in prisons in New Jersey through a program offered by Princeton University and later Rutgers University.
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Chris Hedges has become a fierce critic of mass incarceration in the United States, and his experience as an educator in New Jersey prisons served as inspiration for his 2021 book Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison.
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On October 5,2014, Chris Hedges was ordained a minister within the Presbyterian Church.
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Chris Hedges was installed as Associate Pastor and Minister of Social Witness and Prison Ministry at the Second Presbyterian Church Elizabeth in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
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Chris Hedges began hosting the television show On Contact for the Russian-government owned network RT America in June 2016.
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On Contact provided commentary on social issues, often profiling nonfiction authors and their recently published works with Chris Hedges aiming to follow the approach of former public television shows.
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Chris Hedges said he "might have paid with" his job for making negative comments about the war in Ukraine, "but at least for those six days", after the invasion, he remained in post.
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Chris Hedges has described himself as a socialist and an anarchist.
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In March 2008, Chris Hedges published the book I Don't Believe in Atheists, in which he argues that new atheism presents a danger that is similar to religious extremism.
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On September 20,2014, a day before the People's Climate March, Chris Hedges joined Bernie Sanders, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, and Kshama Sawant on a panel moderated by WNYC's Brian Lehrer to discuss the issue of climate change.
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Chris Hedges appeared as a guest on an October 2011 episode of the CBC News Network's Lang and O'Leary Exchange to discuss his support for the Occupy Wall Street protests; co-host Kevin O'Leary criticized him, saying that he sounded "like a left-wing nutbar".
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Chris Hedges said "it will be the last time" he appears on the show, and compared the CBC to Fox News.
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On November 3,2011, Chris Hedges was arrested with others in New York City as part of the Occupy Wall Street demonstration, during which the activists staged a "people's hearing" on the activities of the investment bank Goldman Sachs and blocked the entrance to their corporate headquarters.
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In 2012, after the Obama administration signed the National Defense Authorization Act, Chris Hedges sued members of the US government, asserting that Section 1021 of the law unconstitutionally allowed presidential authority for indefinite detention without habeas corpus.
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Chris Hedges was later joined in the suit, Hedges v Obama, by activists including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg.
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Chris Hedges petitioned the US Supreme Court to hear the case, but the Supreme Court denied certiorari in April 2014.
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Chris Hedges supported Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the 2016 election.
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On May 27,2020, Chris Hedges announced that he would run as a Green Party candidate in New Jersey's 12th congressional district for the 2020 elections.
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In September 2020, Chris Hedges spoke at the Movement for a People's Party convention.
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Chris Hedges called NATO's actions a "dangerous and sadly predictable provocation" that baited Russia to initiate a conflict.
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Chris Hedges has post-traumatic stress disorder from his experience reporting in war zones, and was once suicidal as a result of trauma.
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In November 2014, Chris Hedges announced that he and his family had become vegan.
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Chris Hedges's wife, Eunice Wong, is a vegan activist and writer.
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Chris Hedges speaks Levantine Arabic, French, and Spanish in addition to his native English.