Sydney Hillel Schanberg (born January 17, 1934) is an American journalist who is best known for his coverage of the war in Cambodia. He has been the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two George Polk awards, two Overseas Press Club awards, and the coveted Sigma Delta Chi prize for distinguished journalism.[2] Schanberg was played by Sam Waterston in the 1984 The Killing Fields film based on the experiences of Schanberg and the Cambodian journalist Dith Pran in Cambodia.
Sydney Schanberg was born in Clinton, Massachusetts and studied at Clinton High School in 1951 before receiving a B.A. in Government at Harvard University in 1955.[3] After initially starting Harvard Law, he requested to be moved up the draft list and undertook basic military training at Fort Hood in Texas.[4]
Schanberg joined The New York Times as a journalist in 1959. He spent much of the early 1970s in Southeast Asia as a correspondent for the Times. For his reporting, he won the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism twice, in 1971 and 1974. In 1971, he wrote about the Pakistani genocide in then-East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Upon being transferred to Southeast Asia, he covered the Vietnam War.