Schanberg joined The New York Times as a journalist in 1959. He spent much of the early 1970's as a Vietnam War correspondent for Times. For his reporting, he won the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism twice, in 1971 and 1974.
Before the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975 and killed approximately 2 million people, Schanberg wrote positively in The New York Times about 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] 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."
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.
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.
Bibliography
Schanberg, Sydney (1980). The Death and Life of Dith Pran. Penguin. ISBN 0140084576.
Schanberg, Sydney (1984). The Killing Fields: The Facts Behind The Film. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
