Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The More You Watch the Less You Know News Wars(sub)Merged HopesMedia Adventures by Danny Schechter The More You Watch the Less You Know. by Robert McChesney and Danny Schechter. Foreword by Jackson Browne and Robert W. McChesney. A candid insider's tale of how the media really works and why it doesn't work the way it should, The More You Watch, The Less You Know has emerged as a key catalyst in the debate on media reform. Since its original release, after more than a hundred television and radio author interviews and countless print reviews and features, The More You Watch, The Less You Know has achieved the near impossible: it has brought the crisis in television news out into the open, gotten it discussed on the very television news programs it critiques, and pretty much everywhere else as well, on the airwaves and off. The More You Watch, The Less You Know recounts Schechter's media adventures, from when he was "Danny Schechter the News Dissector" on 's WBCN radio, to his stints as a producer at ABC's 20/20 and CNN, to his personal odyssey chronicling the anti- revolution in , to his development of innovative programming like South Africa Now and Rights & Wrongs as an independent producer. In this age of telecommunications bills and media mergers, The More You Watch, The Less You Know is an insider’s passionate plea for freedom of the (electronic) press. Buying options. “In the era of the incredibly shrinking sound bite . . . producer Danny Schechter stands apart.” “As 'news dissector' on Boston radio, Danny Schechter literally educated a generation. . . . He went on to become what he describes as a 'mole in the media machine.' His account of his struggles, and considerable achievements, should enlighten [and] inspire.” “Schechter has a keen sense of what is happening in network news.” Did you know that the U.S. military is deployed in 70% of the world's nations? Or that leaked State Deptartment cables show that the U.S. planned to instigate civil strife in Syria as early in 2006? What about the chronic problem of medical neglect in private, for-profit, U.S. immigrant- only jails? No? Neither did the rest of the world. That's because these and countless other news items are suppressed or ignored by our nation's "free press" every day. For the past forty years, Project Censored has been unearthing the buried stories that corporate media deem unfit to print. They also just hosted a jam-packed Media Freedom Summit and co-founded the Global Critical Media Literacy Project in partnership with the Action Coalition for Media Education and the graduate program in Media Literacy and Digital Culture at Sacred Heart University. To celebrate, we're showcasing Censored 2017 at a 25% off online discount and offering 50% off Censored backlist titles (from Censored 1996 to Censored 2006 ), along with select Seven Stoires books on media literacy, including titles by Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky. Formerly a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard, DANNY SCHECHTER made waves in the mainstream and alternative media for more than 30 years. Called the "alternative Walter Cronkite," he witnessed and participated in the history-making events of our age: from the founding of the Yippies in 1967; to 's triumphant presidential election in 1994, for which Schechter was designated the exclusive filmmaker; to the Media and Democracy Congress of 1996, which he helped organize; to his most recent television production, Rights & Wrongs , which aired weekly on over 150 PBS and cable outlets nationwide. His many TV specials and films include Beyond Life: Timothy Leary Lives (1997), Countdown to Freedom: Ten Days that Changed South Africa (1994), narrated by and , Sarajevo Ground Zero (1993), Mandela in America (1990), and The Making of Sun City (1990). For eight years a producer at ABC's 20/20 , where he won two National News Emmys, Schechter reported from 45 countries and lectured at many schools and universities. He was co-founder and executive producer at Globalvision, a New York-based television and film company where he produced the award-winning series South Africa Now and co-produced Right & Wrongs: Human Rights Television with Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Schechter passed away in 2015. A longtime media analyst and critic of capitalism, Robert McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2002, he co-founded the Free Press, a media reform organization, and acted as its president until 2008. McChesney lives in Illinois. Our Media Not Theirs. Our Media, Not Theirs! The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media examines how the current media system in the United States undermines democracy, and what we can do to change it. Robert McChesney and John Nichols begin by detailing how the media system has come to be dominated by a handful of transnational conglomerates that use their immense political and economic power to saturate the population with commercial messages. They reveal how journalism, electoral politics, entertainment, art and culture have all suffered as a result, and use examples of media coverage of the 2000 Presidential Elections and the War On Terror to illustrate the poverty of information corporate media actually provide. McChesney and Nichols also explain how the Internet, which many once argued would open up the media system to a cornucopia of new voices and creativity, has been lost for the most part to the corporate communication system. Our Media, Not Theirs! contains proposals for making our media system more responsive to the needs of the citizenry and less dominated by corporate greed. The authors look at how political parties, grassroots movements and popular performers in other democratic nations increasingly have made media reform a political priority. The authors provide an analysis of the burgeoning media reform activities in the United States, and outline ways we can structurally change the media system through coalition work and movement-building. McChesney and Nichols go on to provide readers with the tools to battle for a better media. They offer an invaluable analysis, and clear ways to fight back against corporate domination of democracy. Danny Schechter, ‘News Dissector’ and Human Rights Activist, Dies at 72. Danny Schechter, whose media criticism became a staple of Boston radio and who went on to champion human rights as an author, filmmaker and television producer, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 72. The cause was pancreatic cancer, his brother, Bill, said. Mr. Schechter infused almost all his work — whether it was for alternative or mainstream media — with his deep-rooted advocacy of human rights. He was a producer of an award-winning public television series, “South Africa Now,” and of the ABC News magazine “20/20.” His cherubic, if bewhiskered, countenance belied an indomitability that began with the , projected him into the front lines of the campaign against apartheid in South Africa and endeared him to a generation of counterculture radio listeners as “the media dissector.” He described himself as a “participatory journalist.” “What distinguished Schechter,” John Nichols wrote in The Nation online, “was his merging of a stark and serious old-school I. F. Stone-style understanding of media power and manipulation with a wild and joyous Yippie-infused determination to rip it up and start again.” In a tribute on his Facebook page, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, the former public radio and television correspondent, wrote that Mr. Schechter had “used the media as Edward R. Murrow defined its mission: To teach, illuminate and inspire.” Daniel Isaac Schechter was born in Manhattan on June 27, 1942. His father, Jerry, was a garment center pattern maker who became a sculptor. His mother, the former Ruth Lisa Lubin, was a secretary who became a poet. Mr. Schechter grew up in , the grandson of socialist immigrants, and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and , interrupting his studies there to organize rent strikes in Harlem. As an organizer for the Northern Student Movement, he also marched for civil rights in Washington and in the South. Latest Updates. He received his master’s degree from the London School of Economics, where he became active in the antiapartheid movement. In 1971 Mr. Schechter joined the Boston rock station WBCN-FM, where he found a following as “Danny Schechter, the News Dissector.” Noam Chomsky, the linguist and emeritus professor at the Institute of Technology, recalled the “enlightenment and insight and humor” of his broadcasts, which, he said, “literally educated a generation.” At the end of each broadcast, Mr. Schechter borrowed a phrase from Wes Nisker, a San Francisco broadcaster, and exhorted his listeners: “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.” He joined CNN in its early days, in 1980, before moving to “20/20,” where his work won two Emmy Awards. In 1988, he and Rory O’Connor founded Globalvision, a New York production company, which produced “Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television,” a 1990s series hosted by Ms. Hunter-Gault, and “South Africa Now,” a weekly public affairs program that won a George Polk Award in 1990. In a letter to in 1991, Mr. Schechter defended his programs against complaints from some stations that they crossed the line into advocacy. “How many PBS stations may have decided not to air our programs because they don’t want the controversy generated by the self-styled media police?” he wrote. “Self-censorship is always the hardest to detect. The public television system needs to be more open to programming that challenges the conventional wisdom, that lets the voices of the world in.” By his count, he wrote 17 books, among them “The More You Watch the Less You Know: News Wars/(sub)Merged Hopes/Media Adventures” and “Madiba A-Z: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela.” He also made more than 30 films, including six documentaries on Mr. Mandela and another titled “WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception,” and had blogged since 2002. He lived in Manhattan. Besides his brother, he is survived by a daughter, Sarah, and Denzil McKenzie, who lived with the family for years. His two marriages ended in divorce. “I know all this is easy for me to say,” Mr. Schechter wrote a year ago on Common Dreams, which describes itself as a website for the progressive community. “All I seem to have these days is this keyboard to crank out more condemnations and calls to action, knowing full well, as I do it, that I don’t know what else to do. I am compelled to make media, compelled to do what I can, thinking modestly that perhaps somewhere, in hearts I don’t know, words or images can still stir souls to rise.” Dumbing Down Network News. Journalists' books about themselves and their trade have changed in the last 30 years. It was once the reporter as hero (Woodward and Bernstein's "All The President's Men," for example), then reporters as obedient sheep (Mark Hertsgaard's "On Bended Knee"). Today we have the disillusioned journalist crying out in anger over major media corporations treating the news as just another product to be milked for quick profit and minimal quality. Danny Schechter, TV reporter, network producer and documentarian, joins this genre with "The More You Watch, The Less You Know," a bitter indictment of broadcasting systems that "value entertainment more than information, diversion more than democracy." The book is a blow- by- blow account of the steady "dumbing down" of programs and news over the years, and few of Schechter's former employers -- or celebrity journalists -- escape unscathed. Schechter began his own television career as a summer replacement on the Boston public station, WGBH, followed by a tumultuous turn at Ted Turner's CNN and ABC's "20/20." He left to produce his own in-depth films -- "Sarajevo Ground Zero," "Beyond JFK: The Question of Conspiracy" -- which he sells to the mainstream he left in disgust. His bizarre first network experience was at CNN, Schechter writes, in the early days of Ted Turner's invention. Turner once requested a meeting on whether a CNN interview with him would affect prices on the network's upcoming offer of stock to the public. It turned out to be a men's room encounter that "lasted as long as it took us to purge our bladders." Schechter left CNN with the conclusion, "I found that the bigger companies get, the less gutsier they become." Schechter's time as a producer for ABC's "20/20" is the centerpiece of his detailed dissection of the commercial broadcast culture. ABC, he concludes, stands for Always Be Conservative, and "20/20" is a place where "you learned, almost by osmosis, where the limits were. . . . You were soon in that gray area where self-awareness and self- censorship meet and merge." Ideas for programs with social conscience implications are dismissed with, "We've done it," even though the "it" could have been years before and a different "it." Network celebrity journalists were permitted to do puff pieces on favored public personalities (including Rupert Murdoch) and editors who protested too strongly were put in humiliating jobs until they quit. Finally, in 1988, Schechter also quit, expressing disgust with the network's coverage of the Gulf War, which he felt was merely a testimonial for weapons manufacturers, depicting the war as a bloodless arcade game. 'Fentanyl has changed the whole landscape': San Francisco faces worst drug epidemic ever California picks $1.5M vaccine lottery winners: How do you know if you won? Three stealth fighter jets just scrambled over Hawaii, and no one will say why Ex-lawmaker insisted her sister-in-law was murdered in burned trailer. Now she's been killed at the same site. SFO flight 'rerouted' after passengers brawl over ‘elbow placement’ on armrests Southwest Airlines grounds planes, cancels 500 flights amid computer glitch 'Life threatening heat' is coming to Bay Area. Here's how hot it will get. Though with no future paycheck in sight, "I left '20/20' for what was at first 0/0." Nevertheless, he and an old colleague, Rory O'Connor, started Globalvision, Inc., a film company that specializes in international, multicultural work. From this point on, Schechter's account is dominated by a serious description of events in South Africa, about which he has made numerous documentaries -- "Countdown to Freedom: Ten Days That Changed South Africa" (narrated by James Earl Jones and Alfre Woodard), "The Making of Sun City," "South Africa Now" and "Rights and Wrongs: Human Rights Television" with Charlayne Hunter- Gault. He is especially hard on the media for oversimplification and lack of reporting from the field. He writes that most foreign news consisted of boiled-down wire service items or isolated dramatic events without their political and economic causes. Schechter has a passionate devotion to the African scene and human rights, and he never loses his sense of outrage. He offered Globalvision's "Rights & Wrongs" series on the human rights struggles in the post-Cold War world to the System, but "a high official" of PBS rejected it because human rights is "an insufficient organizing principle for a TV series." Nor does Schechter's skepticism dim when he deals with his heroes. He filmed the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and did a documentary on a reunion of released political prisoners who survived the ruthless retributions of apartheid. But today Mandela as head of state, he writes sadly, has become too autocratic, and there is talk of corruption in high places. The book's style shifts back and forth abruptly from sober, almost elegiac declarations of concern with ethics and public responsibility to the language of bar talk after deadline. He writes, "Truth is as much a casualty in this media war as in any other. . . . This media war is being fought not with guns, but with marketing strategies and corporate logos." But elsewhere he can report his network's response to his open criticism of television in more colloquial language: "Grumbling is acceptable, but p-- . . . in public is considered bad form." There are small historical errors (the quotation that truth is the first casualty in war is from Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917, not a contemporary of Schechter's). Schechter includes too much gratuitous name-dropping, and with all his damning descriptions of cowardice and greed of media big shots, he likes to hobnob with them. He reprints a photo of Nelson Mandela's letter praising him. But he seems aware of his own egocentricity and self- indulgence. Just as the reader thinks, "Enough already," he disarms with his admission that "I can't feel self-righteous. . . . I enjoy the schmooze. Mingling with the movers, and shaking hands with the people from whose institutions I've fled, can be fun." Amid the photos of Schechter with the rich and famous -- the Dalai Lama, Oprah, Geraldo Rivera, Muhammad Ali, Jane Fonda -- there's one with the caption, "What, me Zelig?" and he again beats the reader to the punch. The book's strength lies in the detail and immediacy of Schechter's experience in the major media, his fight to insert serious human and historical content into the public domain and alarm at what its absence means to the future of democracy. Falun Gong's Challenge to China : Spiritual Practice Or "evil Cult"? : a Report and Reader. In one of the most bizarre cases of political repression in modern history, the People's Republic of China has banned a spiritual practice built around traditional exercises and meditation. They say that Falun Gong has become a dangerous threat to the largest nation on Earth. In a return to the dark days of the Cultural Revolution, they have burned thousands of Falun Gong books and literature. They have beaten and detained thousands of practitioners. They have issued an arrest warrant for Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi. They are sentencing some practioners to long periods of incarceration at show trials. World leaders and human rights groups are speaking out. Why is this happening? Is it because Falun Gong has attracted an estimated l00 million practitioners? What is Falun Gong's appeal? What is it that China fears? This is their story. Largely Unheard. Until Now. This timely non-fiction book presents the inside story of China's crackdown on Falun Gong, taking a stand against the most blatant and pervasive political book burning since the days of Hitler's rise to power. By offering Falun Gong's story in the context of the current crisis in China, it provides an important look at a dramatic underreported and unfolding story. In China, their point of view has been banned. It deserves to be heard worldwide. Veteran journalist Danny Schechter executive produced "China Now" for Channel 13 in 1991. He has written about Chinese issues for Newsday and Z Magazine. He is the author of The More You Watch, The Less You Know (Seven Stories Press) and is the executive producer of Globalvision and executive editor of the Media Channel (www.mediachannel.org). "The picture doesn't add up. What I see here with these people and what they're doing, they seem very normal people. They're from all walks of life; and then on the other side you've got this picture that the Chinese government is painting, and the two just don't match."-Adam Montanaro, Falun Gong practitioner (USA)