by Susan Ellis
t’s been more than 20 years since a deejay at Boston’s WBCN radio
first introduced Danny Schechter as “the news dissector,” but
since that moment he’s taken the name to heart. In his work as
a news producer for CNN and 20/20 and later independently at the
company he co-founded, Globalvision, Schechter says that he’s
always strived to flush out the most important facts in his stories.
But, he adds, it hasn’t always been easy; higher powers have worked
against him and do work against others in the media industry.
In his new book The More You Watch, The Less You Know, Schechter
explains why the media is in such a mess, how it got that way,
and what can be done to remedy its problems. In a recent interview,
he discussed, among other topics, why he wrote the book, the media’s
biggest problems, and why a sound media is so important.
How would you describe your book?
What I’ve tried to do is talk about the media today, and why there’s
been this merger of show business and news business, through the
prism of my own experiences in radio, television, in global news,
and network news, and more recently, for the last 10 years as
an independent producer. I think a lot of the discussion about
news media tends to be abstract or boring. If I can add a personal
voice to the story, it might be more compelling to the readers.
It seems that the media has been taking a drubbing lately. Why
do you think that is?
I think there’s been an aversion to a couple of things that seem
blatantly offensive on one level – somebody’s lying on the highway
bleeding, and a reporter’s standing over him with a microphone
asking him how he feels. That’s one problem.
The next problem is that the media itself has become very much
a part of the system rather than a check of the system. The news
culture and the political culture seem to have fused, so you look
at the pundit shows on the weekends and these guys are indistinguishable
from politicians.
I think, finally, there’s something crude and tasteless about
this journalism that’s really this tabloid-style approach. Because
it’s really insulting to people’s intelligence.
You lament in your book about the struggle between entertainment
and information, but you recognize that people like entertainment.
The irony is that I do too. Personally, I’ve tried to do stories
in an entertainingly engaging way. I think you can do reporting
with high production values, I think you can do it with sharp
images and compelling narratives without being boring, but also
without sacrificing substance.
How would you define responsible journalism?
I think you need a social conscience and context. You need a perspective
on the world. All stories are not the same. You have to be able
to establish priorities, understand the importance of the essence
of the story. Often what we get is a very superficial take on
the thing because reporters don’t have the time or the inclination
to probe a little deeper. So I think responsible journalism is
about telling the truth ultimately, but it’s hard to get at the
truth sometimes.
I also believe in participatory journalism. I think the best
way to understand a story is to get involved to some degree. It
doesn’t mean you have to become an advocate. Although [when I
was] covering South Africa for 30 years, I didn’t hide my convictions
and claim to have some higher level of objectivity, which is usually
a phony, unachievable ideal.
Explain how a few media empires owning many outlets have affected
the news.
Put it this way, if you are head of Company A to buy Company B
for x billion amount of dollars, you have to go and raise money
and get loans. Now you have all this debt as well as having this
enormous business operation. To pay it off, you have to figure
out ways to cut costs, which means downsizing in the news operation.
The easiest people to fire first are the researchers. Instead
of research we have Nexis-Lexis, which means we’re basically repeating
and recycling some of the same old stories.
These companies practice synergy. The same company that owns
the TV network owns the magazine also owns movie studios, etc.
There’s a tendency to cross-promote. Suddenly, Good Morning America
is coming to you live from Disney World and it just happens to
be owned by Disney. There’s this way in which these companies,
because they have so much in stake financially, feel that they
have to push the so-called bottom line concerns of everything
they do.
What is the worst problem plaguing the media?
I think this myth that we’re just giving the people what they
want. Over and over you hear that line. Often somebody in authority
says, “People don’t care about that.” Usually, it translates in
code as, “I don’t care about that.” Unfortunately, the get-along-by-going-along
mentality is produced in a corporate culture. You're working in
an organization with a person you privately know is a dummy, and
yet that dummy is making six times what you’re making, so now
you want to make more money. The way to make more money is to
move up the corporate ladder. How do you move up the corporate
ladder? By being a team player. And when you’re a team player
you don’t often give voice to your dissenting feelings because
that’s counterproductive. You end up getting absorbed in the system.
You cut out to do the kind of work you wanted to do. Is that realistic
for other journalists?
I made the decision to leave because I saw a potential to do something
that wasn’t being done, global programming. I learned pretty fast
that I couldn’t just denounce corporations. I became a corporation
[forming Globalvision with Rory O’Connor]. We realized that our
work, the work that we care about, can never really get seen by
a large number of people unless the distribution apparatus opens
up more. I realized that it was in our interest to try to change
the media system, hence, I did this book. The book cuts two ways.
On the one hand, you can call me a TV turncoat. On the other hand,
I’m trying to place work on these networks to some degree. I’m
trying to work within the system and maybe by mouthing off this
way it could really hurt my career. Things were getting so out
of hand with the O.J. trial and the sickening pervasive coverage
of one spectacle after another, I felt like I had to write about
it. My soul was crying out.
Has there been backlash?
It’s hard to get on some shows I think I should be on. Oprah said
no way. If I wrote a diet book I’d probably get on the air more.
One of the last things you see on television is the impact of
television. Even when all these mergers were going down that affected
the direct interest of the media companies, there was rarely any
reporting on television. It was only reported way in the back
of the paper where most people don’t go.
I’m not alone. Since I wrote this book, Walter Cronkite gave
a major speech blasting corporate agenda. Don Hewitt the head
of 60 Minutes attacked his own network. … I feel like my ideas
started out as being way out there on the margins and are now
moving rapidly into the mainstream. I think we can change the
media in America if we become more attentive to it. Another thing
that I’ve done is create a Web site [www.visitweb.com/moreuwatch]
to provide a place that I call Journalists Anonymous, so that
people in the media can report and post their own experiences
of having their stories spiked or distorted.
When I started working against segregation in the South, most
of America thought, these people are crazy, these people are going
to bring down segregation practice for 100 years? No way. Yet
segregation was overturned. I think the media and democracy movement
today is where the civil-rights movements was in the mid-’50s.
How is reshaping the media as urgent as the civil-rights movement?
Health care for all Americans, social justice, ethical practices
by corporations, a better educational system – all the main issues
of our time – are all dependent on public awareness or public
pressure. If we don’t have a news media that really is informing
people what’s going on, then they can’t take part in all this
and can’t fight for their rights. We’ve got to open up the media
to do its role in fostering democracy.
You mention in the book solutions to help the media such as legislation,
activism. Can you put it in a nutshell?
Yeah, wake up and start getting involved. Talk back to your TV
set. Communicate with media companies, get your organizations
involved in monitoring TV coverage and see who’s being covered
and who isn’t. Try to get media literacy in school and try to
get your politicians talking about this. Not with the idea of
putting the media down or restricting the freedom of the press,
but encouraging media institutions to play the role they’re supposed
to be playing – as a watchdog, not a lapdog. n
For a list of local booksellers carrying The More You Watch, The Less You Know, call 1-800-596-7437.
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