Yahoo Finance Ed Harriman obituary
My father, Ed Harriman, who has died aged 77 of pneumonia following liver surgery, was an investigative journalist and film-maker. He was dedicated to exposing abuses of power and providing the public with information about current affairs, science, history and social issues.
Born in New York, he grew up in Rochester and Binghamton scouting, playing baseball, trapping muskrats, photographing snow crystals and detonating “cherry bombs” (powerful explosive fireworks that are now banned in the US). He went to high school at St Paul Academy, Minnesota, where his parents, Mary-Stuart (nee Clements) and Ben Harriman, both chemists, had moved to work for the 3M company.
In 1965, after graduating from Amherst College, Massachusetts, Ed moved to London, avoiding the draft to do a master’s and then a PhD at LSE, where he campaigned against the Vietnam war. He also worked as a labourer, digging London Underground’s new Victoria Line. Once he completed his doctorate he lectured in sociology at what is now Birkbeck, University of London and Montpellier University before becoming a journalist in 1974.
He started his journalism career with an article in the Guardian about the oil industry in Aberdeen and worked as a freelance print journalist throughout the rest of 1970s, writing features for the Sunday Times, the Guardian and New Scientist. His first job in television came as a researcher for the BBC’s Horizon documentary series (1974-76).
He then worked on ATV’s Pilger Reports (1977) and for Thames TV (1978). A documentary he secretly filmed about the Czechoslovakian human rights movement, Charter 77, was awarded the Golden Lion at the Chicago film festival.
For a decade from 1979 Ed was a senior researcher for Granada Television, working on more than 20 World in Action films, followed by Hypotheticals, and then Breakthrough at Reykjavik (1987), which won gold medal for TV drama at the New York film and television festival. He was a freelance producer/director from the 90s up to 2015, his films covering family issues, poverty, conflict, weapons, corruption, health, history, science and pollution. His Channel 4 Dispatches film Tapping Into Toxnet (1991) won the Shell Cawston television prize.
In 1992 he travelled to Serb-held territory in Bosnia to make one of the first television investigations revealing genocide against Bosnian Muslims and thereafter remained a close friend and ally of human rights defenders in the Balkans. After filming Secrets of the Iraq War for ITV in 2004, he wrote a series of articles about corruption in Iraq in the London Review of Books and the Guardian.
He also wrote books. Juntas United! (1978), with Peter Chippindale, profiled the cruelty and absurdities of dictatorships across the world. Graham Greene described his book Hack: Home Truths About Foreign News (1987) as “masterly”.
An amateur astronomer, he built telescopes and delighted friends with views from his London garden of Saturn’s rings.
In 1986 he married Barbara Jacobs. She survives him, along with their three sons, Oliver, Andre and me, and their grandson, Leon.
