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by Josh Tyson
Journalism used to be about reporting facts gathered through exhaustive research, not pandering to rich people‘s interests and rephrasing White House press releases. Whereas Clinton’s dayglo jism stained an infamous blue dress, Bush’s metaphorical spuge can be seen dribbling down the chins of some of our nation’s most prominent, newscasters’ faces. It’s moved well past the regurgitation of force-fed information under the pressure of “patriotic” conformity. This new media complacency is the real threat to national security, and it’s got to stop. Enter Danny Schechter. Driven to documentary filmmaking by the dismal state of the media’s “reporting” techniques (his documentary WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception, is currently touring through film festivals and independent screenings), this media sage should be a hero of every working journalist. In a profession on the brink of Dodo-ism, he’s sticking to his guns. A Nieman Fellow in journalism from Harvard in the pages of Fran. We knew it was only a matter of time.
Did your departure form ABC have anything to do with your level of disillusionment with the mainstream media?
When I left ABC, I was growing dissatisfied with what I saw as the tendency towards more infotainment than information. There was this merger of news biz and showbiz going on. I started a company with a colleague called Globalvision Independent Media in 1988, doing all kinds of programming: documentaries, series, even entertainment specials. So we weren’t just criticizing, we were also competing; trying to offer a different approach to covering the world. In 2000, we set up www.mediachannel.org.
I had joined the media to spotlight the problems of the world, and I’d come to believe that the media was one of the problems of the world. So I started a network with twenty affiliates, now it’s 1,168, and Walter Cronkite [is] our lead advisor. I began writing, on September 11th, a blog, every day, about what’s in the news and what’s not in the news. What are other people seeing and reading that we’re not? That led to writing about the lead up to the war in Iraq. I embedded myself in my living room and began watching television. Comparing and contrasting coverage from not only our channels, but from overseas channels, those that I could see. That led to a book called, Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception. It was the first book out on the Iraq war [published in July of 2003]. I was just so outraged by what I was seeing, and feeling like this was the end of journalism as we know it, that I began making this film. Hopefully it can have some impact on the debate. The debate on the war started as policy debate. There were policy failures being questioned, then there were intelligence failures being questioned. “Did the CIA know? Did the National Security Agency know? What did the president know…?”
It’s all so malleable, it almost seems liquid.
Well now we’ve moved into a debate about media failures. The Washington Post and The New York Times have both acknowledged that their coverage was flawed. That’s a big acknowledgement because they are the dynamic duo of American journalism, and they’re admitting that they screwed up. However, I’m focusing on television because I think that is where the majority of people get their news and information, their images and understanding.
I read an essay you wrote from September 11th, titled, “America Under Attack: Guilty or Not, Here We Come,” and I found it almost prophetic.
I said, “We’re going to invade Iraq.” I didn’t have any particular intelligence, it just looked like that’s where this was going. I think I’ve been on target, and often ahead of the curve … Once The New York Times admitted that it was flawed, then people said to me, “Yeah, you were right.” Otherwise, It’s kind of a lonely fight. Many people in the media were actually proud of their coverage. You know, “Look how brave they are. Look how heroic they are, the embedded reporters. You’ve never seen war this close up. Look what’s going on. Rah, rah America. Saddam is this evil-doer,” and so forth. And it was just a litany of propaganda, which continues to this day ... My point here is not to say, “Look, you guys screwed up.” It’s to try to understand what happened in Iraq. Why did our media rally behind it when media all over the world were questioning it and challenging it? Why did Americans see a different war than everyone else in the rest of the world? I feel like a lot of what I believe in, in terms of the duty of the American media to be a watchdog on power–or to be able to expose wrongdoing–a lot of that began to crumble when I saw colleagues sort of get not embedded, but in bed, with this administration in a totally uncritical way.
Do you think that documentaries like yours, and Michael Moore’s, and Outfoxed are going to be key to changing the media’s current state.
Their success in the marketplace is undeniable. Nobody expected that ... It’s very hard when you’re a media person. It’s one thing to take on Bush, everybody’s doing it. But if you work in the media yourself and you go after your former employer, and you go after the media industry, that’s a far riskier course. How do we survive in the media business if we challenge The Man? These are the issues we are grappling with, but we’re moving forward because we believe that truth matters ... This is an issue that resonates and touches a chord with people, across the spectrum, left and right. It’s not one of these partisan issues ... Media is a global issue. It’s my view that we wouldn’t have had this war if the media hadn’t done more selling than telling. I’m a former network producer at CNN and ABC News, so I come from inside of that world and I bring experience, having been in the media for thirty years. I’m operating on a multimedia offensive here. I’m fighting my own media war against what I see as weapons of mass deception … How do you have a democracy if people are not informed?
Word. Now, run tell that…
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