H4CBlog

According to Chris Hedges:

There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.

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Hedges was part of The New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.