Schechter's writing on politics, human rights and the media spanning four decades of activism and reporting: from Vietnam and South Africa to the American Civil rights movement and the hazards of the global corporate media. An important book by one of the few working journalists to emerge from the alternative media of the 60s and 70s with his politics and principals intact.
How Boston radio station WBCN became the hub of the rock-and-roll, antiwar, psychedelic solar system. While San Francisco was celebrating a psychedelic Summer of Love in 1967, Boston stayed buttoned up and battened down. But that changed the following year, when a Harvard Law School graduate student named Ray Riepen founded a radio station that played music that young people, including the hundreds of thousands at Boston-area colleges, actually wanted to hear. WBCN-FM featured album cuts by such artists as the Mothers of Invention, Aretha Franklin, and Cream, played by announcers who felt free to express their opinions on subjects that ranged from recreational drugs to the war in Vietnam. In this engaging and generously illustrated chronicle, Peabody Award–winning journalist and one-time WBCN announcer Bill Lichtenstein tells the story of how a radio station became part of a revolution in youth culture. At WBCN, creativity and countercultural politics ruled: there were no set playlists; news segments anticipated the satire of The Daily Show; on-air interviewees ranged from John and Yoko to Noam Chomsky; a telephone “Listener Line” fielded questions on any subject, day and night. From 1968 to Watergate, Boston’s WBCN was the hub of the rock-and-roll, antiwar, psychedelic solar system. A cornucopia of images in color and black and white includes concert posters, news clippings, photographs of performers in action, and scenes of joyousness on Boston CommonInterwoven through the narrative are excerpts from interviews with WBCN pioneers, including Charles Laquidara, the “news dissector” Danny Schechter, Marsha Steinberg, and Mitchell Kertzman. Lichtenstein’s documentary WBCN and the American Revolution is available as a DVD sold separately.
DANNY SCHECHTER, "The News Dissector" has spent decades as a truth teller in the media, with leading media companies and as an independent filmmaker with the award-winning independent company Globalvision. A graduate of Cornell and the London School of Economics, Schechter was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a multiple Emmy Award winner at ABC News, where he was among the first to cover the S&L crisis. In 2007, his film IN DEBT WE TRUST was the first to expose Wall Street's connection to subprime loans, predicting the economic crisis that this book investigates. Schechter is a blogger, editor of Mediachannel.org, and author of nine books. He has reported from 53 countries, and lives in Gotham. He owns no derivatives or tranches.
From the makers of the major motion picture Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, a completely unique biography and thematic telling of the story of Nelson Mandela. This book, which provided key source material for the film, is an unexpurgated collection of the views and opinions of South Africa's first Black president, and it draws on Danny Schechter’s forty-year relationship with "Madiba," as Nelson Mandela is known in his native South Africa. Each chapter of this unique portrait corresponds to a letter of the alphabet, and the letters cover major and minor, unexpected and fascinating themes in Mandela’s life and his impact on others: Athlete, Bully, Comrade, Forgiveness, Indigenous, Jailed, Militant, and President, to name a few. The book quotes liberally from Mandela himself, his ex-wives and other family members, global leaders, Mandela's cellmates and guards on Robben Island, the team behind Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, former president F. W. de Klerk, members of the South African Police, and his comrades including his successor Thabo Mbeki. Madiba A to Z reveals sides of Nelson Mandela that are not often discussed and angles of the anti-apartheid movement that most choose to brush under the table in order to focus on the happy-ending version of the story. As Schechter reports in the book, according to Mandela's successor as president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, “the fundamental problems of South Africa, poverty, inequality, have remained unchanged since 1994.” This is partly because, as Schechter writes, “six months before the 1994 elections, when South Africa was being governed jointly by the ANC and the National Party under a Transitional Executive Council (TEC), there were secret negotiations about the economic future.” There are many rarely spoken of revelations in Madiba A to Z, a book about Mandela’s brilliance, his courage, his tremendous impact in saving his country and its people of all races, but one that also shows how far South Africa still has to go.
The author critically examines media coverage since September 11th. He analyzes what has been covered and left out in news coverage of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath. The result is a scathing account of how the media has become a megaphone forthe US military ant its war on terror.
Danny Schechter the "News Dissector," a veteran journalist, filmmaker, and participant in many social movements, began covering Occupy Wall Street for Al Jazeera and other leading websites, international TV News programs, and Progressive Radio Network shows. Occupy collects his essays, blog reports, and movement documents. As the filmmaker behind "In Debt We Trust" (2006) and "Plunder: The Crime of Our Time" (2010), Danny Schechter has specialized in exposing Wall Street crime in three books and many reports. He says, "This is the movement we have been waiting for to 'fight the power.' Even as debt strangled millions, and unemployment rose alongside foreclosures, economic issues only remained fodder for boring pundits and self-styled experts. There was no activist response. Until now." Schechter explains, "Occupy Wall Street has a way of touching you personally with its gutsy honesty and democratic spirit. Yet, I was not always uncritical. I want it to succeed, but I'm also aware of its many contradictions and internal conflicts." *Occupy* provides the News Dissector's in-depth assessment of a global revolt in the making. DANNY SCHECHTER is a writer, television producer, and independent filmmaker who also speaks about media and financial issues. He is the editor of Mediachannel1.org and blogs daily as the News Dissector at NewsDissector.net. Schechter is the author of fourteen books and has produced and directed more than thirty documentaries and television specials. His blog was named the 2009 "Blog of the Year" by the Hunter College Media Department of the City University of New York.
In the early nineteenth century, body snatching was rife because the only corpses available for medical study were those of hanged murderers. With the Anatomy Act of 1832, however, the bodies of those who died destitute in workhouses were appropriated for dissection. At a time when such a procedure was regarded with fear and revulsion, the Anatomy Act effectively rendered dissection a punishment for poverty. Providing both historical and contemporary insights, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute opens rich new prospects in history and history of science. The new afterword draws important parallels between social and medical history and contemporary concerns regarding organs for transplant and human tissue for research.
This is an excellent source which puts students in the heart of the contemporary discussion and encourages them to form opinions. It is a great resource for seminars as well as gateways to research. - Paul Matthews, University College Birmingham "An excellent text that covers not only how the media cover acts of terrorism but also how terror groups can manipulate the media." - David Lowe, Liverpool John Moores University Have the media contributed to exacerbating the political, cultural and religious divides within Western societies and the world at large? How can media be deployed to enrich, not inhibit, dialogue? To what extent has the media, in all its forms, questioned, celebrated or simply accepted the unleashing of a ′war on terror′? Media and Terrorism: Global Perspectives brings together leading scholars to explore how the world′s media have influenced, and in turn, been influenced by terrorism and the war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11. Accessible and user-friendly with lively and current case studies, it is an essential handbook on the dynamics of war and the media in a global context.
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. The More You Watch, The Less You Know recounts Schechter's media adventures, from when he was "Danny Schechter the News Dissector" on Boston's WBCN radio, to his stints as a producer at ABC's 20/20 and CNN, to his personal odyssey chronicling the anti-Apartheid revolution in South Africa, 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.
Now a highly politicised medium, this book of prison literature collects a lively array of selections from the earliest recorded convict autobiographies, examining crimes, arrests and convictions, punishments inflicted, survival techniques and spiritual awakenings. Hard labour in coal mines, whippings, solitary confinement in bare unheated cells, water torture and iron maidens were just a few of the punishments meted out to these prisoners and vividly recounted in these selections.
