May/June 2006

Featured Story

Countering Journalistic Jingoism: Fellowship interviews Danny Schechter

By Jennifer Hyman

Danny Schechter. Photo courtesy newsdissector.org

It is early 2003. Eighty percent of Americans – those receiving their news solely from mainstream television networks – are glued to their screens, watching the relentless build-up to war in Iraq. The media, at least, leave no doubt that there will be war. Slogans such as “America Fights Back” and “Countdown Iraq” provide the theme for what passes as news coverage, slogans rippling against a backdrop of red, white, and blue. Breathless, shiny-eyed anchors sporting flags in their jacket lapels ooh and aah with retired military generals over strategy and military hardware. They pore over maps, and talk about “us” versus “them.”

When the pretense of journalistic integrity collapsed during the run-up to war and the invasion that followed, more was at stake than laziness, cowardice, or incompetence. The mainstream media were complicit in convincing the American public that war was the only option, says Danny Schechter, veteran network producer, filmmaker, and media critic, whose documentary WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception and slew of recent books document in chilling detail the cravenly partisan role played by the media in the war.

The mainstream media were not just cheerleaders, Schechter said in a recent interview with Fellowship. They were a powerful weapon in the administration’s arsenal, blindly and unquestioningly feeding the official line to audiences and providing them with no alternative recourse to the facts.

“When people are told every day that Saddam is Hitler, is going to attack us, and implicitly already has, support for taking him out is a foregone conclusion,” said Schechter. “Yet there was a tremendous body of information available before the war that persuaded a majority of the world’s people that war was not needed. If our media had given us that information, and we had had that discussion, it would have at the very least delayed that jump into a war that has been such a disaster.” Schechter says that Americans saw one war on their television screens, while the rest of the world saw another.

Schechter is not the first critic to lay blame for the war on the media, but he goes further than most. While many anti-war activists focus their vitriol at Bush and his cabinet, Schechter maintains that media complicity in fabricating reasons for war makes the media as responsible as the administration. No amount of belated and half-hearted mea culpas (such as those of The New York Times) changes that liability.

Schechter brings solid credentials to his analysis, which is laid out in his latest book, When News Lies: Media Complicity and the Iraq War. He is no maverick or novice outsider, carping at a profession he doesn’t understand. Schechter is a media veteran, a “journalist’s journalist” who has done it all and knows how the media operate. He has been a reporter, writer, editor, news director, TV correspondent, and TV producer. He was part of the CNN start-up team, and then moved to ABC News, where he produced the acclaimed television magazine “20/20.” His numerous awards include two Emmys and the prestigious George Polk Award. Schechter, a graduate of Cornell University and the London School of Economics, also won a coveted Neiman Fellowship in Journalism at Harvard University.

While Schechter accuses the media of complicity – even criminal complicity – in the war, he stops short of claiming a conspiracy. Instead, he offers a rationale for the collapse of journalistic skepticism and courage.

“The American media mobilized after 9/11,” he says. “Here was this huge psychological trauma, this invulnerable colossus that is attacked out of the blue. The media saw their role in part as unifying the country and rallying people behind the government. The reasons for the attack were never examined or explored – beyond ‘Why do they hate us?’”

Schechter believes – and most journalists would agree – that there is a general ideological consensus within newsrooms that government is essentially good and legitimate. In a time of stress and attack, that consensus readily spills over into patriotism, even jingoism.

“There was a real effort to stand together after 9/11,” Schechter says, “which the Bush administration took advantage of. If you dissent, if you offer a counter-narrative, you are soft on terrorism. If you ask questions, you are sending the wrong message to the enemy.”

It didn’t help that Fox News and right-wing talk radio were setting the patriotic standard. To avoid being baited, many networks decided to “outfox Fox and run to the right of Bush,” says Schechter.

Nor was government domination of information likely to encourage dissent. Schechter notes that the Pentagon hired Hollywood producers and public relations executives to launch the war. It was a product roll-out, and the media took over as chief marketer. Pundits (whose numbers tripled those of reporters on the main networks, reports Schechter), sloganeering and the ubiquitous daily message from the White House replaced objective reporting. Journalists no longer bothered to go through the motions of challenging the message.

Schechter admits he is obsessive when it comes to media coverage of the war. Yet he is not bitter and uses dollops of humor to make his case. On the chauvinist flavor of the coverage, he concludes that it is simply AAU – All About Us. “It’s always all about us, not Iraq,” he says. “The media focuses on ‘our boys’ and ‘our agendas,’ not Iraqi civilians, religious leaders, or political representatives.” In that context, Iraqis resisting U.S. forces are naturally referred to as “insurgents” or “foreign fighters,” not the mujahideen or homegrown resistance, which is what locals call them.

Schechter is not afraid to question the role of media self-interest in determining media coverage of the war. Recent policies of the Federal Communications Commission had encouraged hitherto unheard-of media consolidation (from more than 50 media companies in the 1980s to half a dozen today). But the networks wanted more rule changes, to allow big media companies to become bigger. Schechter sees a sort of quid pro quo here, concluding that “As the networks uncritically waved the flag, the FCC waived the rules.”

Today, Danny Schechter carries on the struggle for media reform and media accountability through the online Web “super site” he founded, Mediachannel.org (slogan: “As the Media Watch the World, We Watch the Media”); through documentaries produced by his film company, Globalvision; in his books (titles below) and his daily “News Dissector” blog. He organizes, lectures, writes for leading newspapers and magazines, and, like most alternative journalists, struggles for funding.

It was not always so. Before going independent and becoming a media watchdog, Schechter’s reputation in mainstream media was well established.

His interest in journalism dates as far back as high school, when his hero was the legendary Edward R. Murrow. “I tended, unrealistically perhaps, to see journalism as a public service, as a way of contributing to a democratic discourse,” he says.

In the 1960s, Schechter contributed investigative pieces to the muckraking magazine Ramparts, and also worked full-time as a civil rights worker in the South. His first career position, ironically, also created his current moniker: in 1970, he became the “News Dissector” at Boston’s leading rock radio station, WBCN. Reporting, editing, and directing the news on local stations followed. Then came the television networks, and various stints as a correspondent reporting from dozens of countries around the world. But despite having “made it,” Schechter felt a growing need to cover issues that weren’t being covered in the mainstream media. He branched out into independent and alternative press and radio – and began working as an independent filmmaker.

This stood him in good stead when, in 1988, he defected from the mainstream to become, in his words, a “network refugee.”

So why did a successful network journalist, who made good money and received his share of the profession’s accolades, turn himself into a exile from mainstream media and one of its most unrelenting critics?

One answer lies in what was happening to the media in the 1980s. Media companies were buying up independent outlets and forming giant media conglomerates concerned with profits and the bottom line. Expensive and time-consuming investigative journalism was being edged out by more profitable “entertainment journalism.” News was morphing into a string of events, devoid of context, and action-oriented spectacles, with “breaking news” applying to the most recent, not the most important, spectacle.

For Danny Schechter, the answer also lies in the reason he became a journalist in the first place. “I joined the media to spotlight problems in the world,” he says. “I later came to see that the media were one of the problems in the world.”

Danny Schechter was interviewed for Fellowship by Jennifer Hyman, communications coordinator at the Fellowship of Reconciliation, following a public presentation at the FOR headquarters in Nyack, New York on March 5, 2006. Entitled “The Media and the War: Who's Zooming Who?” the presentation included excerpts from Schechter’s documentary, WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception, and a book-signing for his latest book, When News Lies: Media Complicity and the Iraq War. The latter is available from the FOR Bookstore (e-mail bookstore@forusa.org). Other recent books by Danny Schechter include The Death of Media and the Fight to Save Democracy (Melville House, 2005), Media Wars: News at a Time of Terror (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) and Hail to the Thief: How the Media “Stole” the 2000 Presidential Election (edited with Roland Schatz, Inovatio Books, Bonn, Germany, 2000).

See page 26 of this issue for Schechter's review of Caught in the Crossfire: The Untold Story of Fallujah.

©2006 Fellowship of Reconciliation