Chris Hedges Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education

Chris Hedges was born in 1956 in Vermont and came of age in a household steeped in the Protestant social gospel. His father, a Presbyterian minister, modeled a form of faith that joined theology to public witness, supporting civil rights and opposing the Vietnam War. The moral seriousness of that upbringing shaped Hedges early sense of vocation, including an enduring interest in the ethical claims of politics, war, and conscience. After undergraduate study at Colgate University, he entered Harvard Divinity School, where he explored the intellectual and historical dimensions of religion with the rigor that would later mark his reporting and essays. He chose journalism as his ministry, carrying to the field a theological literacy and ethical framework uncommon in the newsroom.

Early Reporting Career

Hedges began reporting in the late 1970s and 1980s, gravitating to conflict zones and societies in upheaval. He reported from Central America during the brutal wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua and filed from the Middle East and North Africa as authoritarian states, insurgent movements, and external powers collided. Early stints with outlets such as National Public Radio, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Dallas Morning News honed a craft that prized eyewitness detail, historical context, and the voices of civilians caught between militias, armies, and death squads. The experiences forged a central theme of his later work: that war is a toxin that distorts language, numbs moral vision, and devours the young.

The New York Times Correspondent

Hedges joined The New York Times in 1990 and spent nearly a decade and a half as a foreign correspondent, including service as a bureau chief in the Middle East. He covered the first Gulf War, the Balkan wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Palestinian uprising, and the post-9/11 landscape of insurgency and occupation. As part of a Times team examining global terrorism and its networks after September 11, he shared in the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. His colleagues and editors sent him repeatedly to front lines because he insisted on reporting from the streets, refugee camps, and besieged towns where the stakes were most visible.

Hedges became publicly controversial in 2003 after he delivered a commencement address at Rockford College in Illinois, where he criticized the invasion of Iraq. The speech was shouted down, his microphone was cut, and, afterward, his employer formally reprimanded him for political comments. He soon left the paper, committing himself to books, teaching, and independent journalism.

Books and Ideas

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002) distilled his experiences into a meditation on the seductions of nationalism, the narcotic of violence, and the necessity of moral limits. He followed with Losing Moses on the Freeway, a reflection on the Ten Commandments in modern life, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, which explored the authoritarian temptations of politicized religion. With Laila Al-Arian he co-wrote Collateral Damage: Americas War Against Iraqi Civilians, documenting the testimonies of U.S. veterans about civilian harm. Empire of Illusion and Death of the Liberal Class charted what he saw as the collapse of civic institutions and the substitution of spectacle for democratic deliberation. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, created with the cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco, blended reportage and graphic narrative to map Americas sacrifice zones, from deindustrialized towns to broken reservations. Later works, including Wages of Rebellion, America: The Farewell Tour, Our Class, and The Greatest Evil Is War, returned to themes of resistance, decay, and moral repair. Across these books he acknowledged intellectual debts to figures he interviewed or cited, among them the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, whose phrase inverted totalitarianism Hedges helped popularize.

Teaching and Prison Education

After leaving the daily newsroom, Hedges taught writing and ethics in classrooms ranging from universities to maximum-security prisons in New Jersey. Over years of work in the prison system, he built a sustained workshop that culminated in the creation of an original play by his incarcerated students, later staged by a professional theater under the title Caged. Our Class recounts those years, showing how literature and collaborative art can widen the imaginative horizon for people who live under conditions of permanent punishment. He credits his students with reshaping his understanding of justice and the carceral state, and he has highlighted the colleagues, educators, and community members who made the prison-education consortium possible.

Independent Journalism and Broadcast Work

Hedges developed a public voice outside corporate media. For years he wrote a weekly column for the digital magazine Truthdig, until a labor dispute at the outlet prompted his departure. He then continued his reporting and commentary through ScheerPost, founded by editor Robert Scheer, and launched The Chris Hedges Report as a weekly column and podcast. On television, he hosted Days of Revolt and later On Contact, interviewing writers, organizers, and scholars such as Cornel West and Noam Chomsky about war, labor, surveillance, and democracy. On Contact aired on RT America until that network shuttered in 2022, after which Hedges reconstituted his programming through independent platforms and nonprofit partners.

Public Advocacy and Legal Challenges

Hedges has taken part in acts of civil disobedience, including climate and antiwar protests, in keeping with the pastor-activist example he saw in his family. In 2012 he was the lead plaintiff in Hedges v. Obama, a lawsuit challenging provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act that permitted indefinite military detention. The case drew co-plaintiffs including Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky, and although an initial injunction was later overturned on appeal, the suit became a touchstone of his warnings about the erosion of civil liberties in the name of security.

Personal Life and Collaborators

Hedges is married to the actor and writer Eunice Wong, whose own artistic and editorial work has intersected with campaigns for human rights and prison education. His closest professional collaborations have included projects with Joe Sacco, whose graphics brought additional texture to reportage, and Laila Al-Arian, whose investigative rigor anchored their book on civilian casualties in Iraq. Editors, publishers, and producers across his career have helped amplify his voice, from colleagues at The New York Times to independent media figures such as Robert Scheer. The network of interlocutors he interviews and cites, among them Cornel West and Noam Chomsky, reflects his commitment to linking reporting with moral and philosophical inquiry.

Legacy and Influence

Throughout his career, Hedges has insisted that journalism is a moral enterprise as much as a factual one, and that war and empire corrode republics from within. He argues that democracies fail when institutions turn into spectacles, when economic life exiles the poor, and when language is emptied of meaning. Whether one agrees with his diagnoses or not, his body of work has provided a sustained record of life at the edges of collapse and of the fragile solidarities that arise in resistance. From war zones to prison classrooms, and from mainstream newsrooms to independent media, he has tried to place the experiences of the marginalized at the center of public debate, a mission shaped by the influences of his minister father, his collaborators in journalism and art, and the communities he continues to write about.