Network Refugee
Danny
Schechter
Schechter: How
can I come to a photography seminar and not take a picture. Hi
everybody. I’m Danny Schechter, known as “the news
dissector” to those who know my work. I’m a media
maven, Dan Rather was on vacation and so I’m here. I
want to tell you not to be so defensive and nervous about what you’re
doing. In a sense you epitomize many of the conflicts that
so many of the people inside the media system feel today, drawn as
they are by the imperative to be professional, to do a job that they
believe in, and believe in the importance of doing, and at the same
time are fighting all the time in a kind of guerilla war in a mine
field of all sorts of pressures. Pressures that make it very
hard to do the job and the work that you were trained to do and that
you aspire to do. So journalism itself is under tremendous
pressure. We’re living in a country where a recent survey
shows that 70 percent of the American people, when asked about the
media, 70 percent--not ten percent, not seven percent--70 percent
say it sucks. Now they don’t all say it for the same
reason. Some say it’s too left wing; some say it’s
too right wing; some say it’s too hyper-sexual, some say it’s
too post-modern; some say it’s not post-modern enough, but
there seems to be a consensus, almost a majority, of hostility against
media. Journalists today are ranked somewhere below dogcatcher
in terms of general respect in a profession which, at one time, had
the admiration and respect of most of the people in the United States. We’ve
gotten to the point where it is sort of hip and cool to be hostile
to all media, and by extension in a sense, to kind of de-politicize
the environment, the disrespect the idea that an informed public
is a precondition for a real democracy. When people are not
informed, when people are not knowledgeable, how can they really
effectively participate in our society? At the same time, the
same survey organization the Pew Center, did a survey of journalists
and people working in the media, and they found--guess what? They
found that 70 percent, mirroring the public, are upset, are alienated,
are estranged, are uncomfortable, are in conflict. Some in
denial. Some angry, but most unable to really express those
concerns because they work in an environment where they’re
kind of bound by golden handcuffs. In order to get along you
have to go along. There’s no environment of democratic
debate and discussion within the media where people can sit around
and discuss, critique, analyze, have a Mark Crispin Miller come in
and challenge the staff at CNN and have the people at CNN say he’s
full of shit. That environment does not exist. When I
worked at 20/20 for eight years after being part of the start-up
team at CNN, we attempted to have discussions among the producers
to actually discuss the programs, and what happened was the management
had a grudging interest in letting us do this, and then basically
ditched the whole process. So it became a way of, if you were
too outspoken or too attached to any particular subject, if you really
cared about something, it was almost a guarantee that you wouldn’t
get to do it because the presumption is that you would then be an
advocate and not a journalist. You would then be too immersed
in it to actually do a “balanced and dispassionate job.” So
we’re in an environment, as people, as individuals, where our
own values are often in collision. Are often in incredible
conflict with what we believe in and what our institutions are there
to do. Now this means that we are in a crisis as a democracy
and as a democratic culture, and that people in media roles, whether
you’re a photographer or a consumer of photography, whether
you’re a journalist or an editor or a writer or a producer,
you’re up against a set of problems which will force you, if
you will, to internalize certain restraints. Self-censorship
in America is the most effective restraint. I’m talking
to Carol, my chief editor here, and I know she hates stories about
Palestinians, let’s say. I’m not going to pitch
her a story about it. You know why? Because that will
label me and brand me with her as a person who is to be not trusted,
because we get along with a comfort factor in an environment, particularly
in a corporate environment. Most people try to keep low because the
tall trees get chopped off at the top. So we’re all aware
of the fact that even a Ted Turner, who by the way sold $5 million
worth of his CNN shares yesterday. Even Ted Turner, the founder
of CNN, found himself disposable and dispensable. We’re
in an environment today where certain values are driving the media. And
those values are bottom-line concerns, are not concerns about the
ethics of journalism, not concerns about the need to inform the American
people. What that suggests is that there’s something
else at stake here. When you commented earlier, you said, “Look
at that American flag flying on the banner,” that this whole
story had been packaged with a title, America’s New War, America
Rising, America Fights Back, America, America, America! That
immediately sets up an attitude about the stories. Last week
Dan Rather was interviewed on a major network and denounced American
journalism and its coverage in the war on terrorism. Dan Rather
criticized censorship, self-censorship, manipulation, Pentagon deception. Said
that he felt used and felt he had played a role in misinforming the
American people. Dan Rather, one of the top three anchors. And
the very week that his picture was on the front page of the New York
Times Magazine, you saw those photographs of the three anchors. Now,
this particular story was the lead story in four out of seven daily
newspapers. In London. Because he was interviewed on
the BBC. So I said to myself, my God! Did CBS cover it? So
we checked. Lexus Nexus. Dan Rather. BBC, CBS. Nothing. No
response. We then did a search of America’s newspapers
and yes indeed, Dan Rather was covered in the L.A. Times calendar
section precisely to the effect of one quotation. When Dan
Rather went on the David Letterman show, if you recall, and said, “I
am waiting for my Commander-in-Chief to tell me to. I will
step forward and do what I am supposed to do as a soldier in this
new war.” Dan Rather was promptly interviewed for one
hour by Larry King on CNN to talk about courage and his sense of
patriotism. Dan Rather, months later, dissents and raises troubling
questions about what the war is about, the coverage of the war. Dan
Rather is just a representative person on his own network and in
the American media overall. My point here is not that Dan Rather--you
know, there are many Dan Rathers apparently. This is a multiple
personality--one of them is called Kenneth, but there are others
as well. So this is Dan The Good speaking on BBC News Night. My
point is that there’s a selection process, and in the selection
process there are routines of news coverage and there’s a sort
of script that’s followed in terms of what the story is and
what it isn’t. You don’t know that when you’re
doing it. You don’t know, necessarily. You have
to find that out when there’s an analysis done that’s
comparative that says what’s covered and what isn’t covered
in America. What is the structure of coverage? Because
when you’re just doing your piece or your story, you often
don’t know. And sometimes you have to go outside the
United States to find out what’s happening inside the United
States. This is a publication by a group called Media Tenor,
based in Bonn, Germany. They are media monitors in the German
sense, in the sense that they read and code every word in a given
article or text. They call themselves communications scientists,
they have offices in six countries, and basically they make their
money by selling their findings to big corporations who spend a lot
of money on PR and they want to know did that PR play well in the
media, is their message getting out, how to reformulate it. But
because they’re also ethical, they also do public service analysis,
and here’s: Political Reporting in U.S. Magazines and
TV News, January to December, 2001. After September 11, U.S.
unemployment rose, increasing the numbers of uninsured and the burden
on already selectively affective health system. A rickety stock
market demonstrated the dangers of handing social security over to
private investor accounts as Bush had proposed in the 2000 campaign. The
education system continued its decline, especially in the countries
poorest areas, however, America’s most popular media allotted
less than .05 percent to any of these issues and any issues it might
in any way conflict with the essential agenda of the administration
and its own projection as a savior of civilization.
This
is a German perspective, but the project on Excellence in Journalism
run by Tom Rosenstiel formerly of Newsweek and the Washington Post,
Bill Kovach, formerly of the Atlanta Constitution and also the New
York Times and the curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, just
did a survey of American television news. It just came out,
which basically reports that with the exception of a three-week block
of time in the immediate aftermath of September 11, we are now back
to the summer of shark attacks. We are now back to Chandra
news, we are now back, in a sense, to all the O.J., all the time
approach to news coverage. The same media that said, after
September 11, “the world has changed forever,” did not
itself changed very much. So this a problem, this is a problem
that is not considered a problem, by too many people with the exception
of Mark Crispin Miller and a handful of media critics, etc. I
joined the media because I wanted to spotlight some of the problems
of the world. I started out in high school journalism and won
a Columbia Medallist Award, I went to Dewitt Clinton High School
in the boogie-down Bronx, and that’s where I learned about
journalism. I worked, as has been recounted, in rock and roll
radio and magazine journalism and in local TV news and then at CNN,
ABC News, and then in 1988, with my partner who was then working
at 48 Hours, sort of defected from the system, became a network refugee. In
the words of the New York Daily News, “A hero of downward mobility,” and
launched a company called Globalvision, as an independent television
company to try to actually do the kinds of things I felt weren’t
possible within the limited confines of network television; the kinds
of stories that I cared about. That I thought people should
care about, and that mattered. One of those stories was what
was happening then in 1988 in a place South Africa where, as the
human rights abuses increased the coverage in American, decreased. Where
people compared South Africa to the Civil Rights Movement without
any really understanding of the situation where here we had a minority
that was oppressed, and there we had a situation of a majority that
was not only disenfranchised, but also disempowered in their own
land. So we began a program, as a run-off, called “South
African Now,” as a television series. We ended up doing
it for 156 weeks of reporting from South Africa, except with one
difference. I wasn’t allowed to go there. I was
actually banned because of prior involvement with this issue. So
we worked with crews inside South Africa, what we call “bottom-up
journalism.” If you notice, most journalism, most of the people,
the experts and the people being interviewed, are people at the top
of society. Usually they come from a very small elite of decision-makers,
policy-makers, so-called experts, and their basic claim to fame is
that they’re good sound byte artists essentially. They
can get it down to five to seven seconds, they can be punchy, and
if they’re very good, they get their own show. So we
create news formats that resemble the most popular format on cable
television. You know what that is? Wrestling. Wrestling
is the most successful and profitable format on cable television,
so what do we have on the news programs? Hardball, Crossfire
and other programs where the premise is heat, not light. Find
the most extreme points of view, pit them against each other, let
people scream and yell at each other--these so-called “shout
shows.” At the end of the day, if they are halfway intelligent,
you’re sitting there saying, “Gee, he made a good point,
he made a good point, that was not a bad point,” everything
cancels each other out and you’re left where you started. Not
really understanding not such much what the information is, but how
to understand it and how to make sense of it. So you come to
a place where in order to actually watch television or read newspapers,
you need a critical perspective, you need to understand something
about the techniques of production--of how the news is produced. We
saw some good examples of it here. I have a lot of questions
about some of your stories because since September 11, I’ve
been writing 3,000 words a day, every day, with some exceptions,
about the coverage of this crisis. Reporting on CNN’s
reporting, reporting on what’s reported here, but also in the
rest of the world. And I’ll tell you how we do that and
what that’s about. My basic premise here is that as I
suggested, as I got into media largely because I wanted to call attention
to some of the problems of the world, I came to see that the media
was one of those problems. In other words, when Marshall McLuhan
wrote about television, he used an interesting term. He called
it “pervasively invisible.” It’s there. It’s
in front of us. We all see it and yet we don’t see it. It’s
a piece of furniture in our living rooms. It’s our friend. It’s
on when we click the remote. In fact the whole idea of a remote
control is itself a metaphor for who is in control. Nominally
it’s you because you are choosing between the choices that
you’re given. You’re clicking between the channels
and the choices, but the lack of voices on those channels are already
limiting the discourse that you’re being exposed to. In
every television station there is a room where the decisions are
made about what gets on the air, it’s called “The Control
Room.” And in the control room there’s a director. And
that director’s choosing the images. If you’re
making a music video, it’s often like this, “give me
an A, give me a B,” just a collection of a collage of images. But
often, what is shown is often done with a kind of respect to certain
kinds of formats and formula considerations about what stories play,
and if you look at CNN International and you look at CNN America,
it’s the same company, the same format but different stories! Different! Chris
Kramer, head of CNN International, is on a panel and he’s saying, “Jesus
Christ! That guy Beretta, what’s his name? The
guy who shot his wife and was arrested? I wouldn’t have
given that guy more than ten seconds!” But there it was
playing endlessly, recycled, on CNN. Domestic. Exactly. My
point. My point is: If you’re a frog in a whale,
you’re in the whale and you look up at the sky and you think
that’s the sky because that’s the sky you see, but the
sky is bigger than that sky. And there are people who are making
different choices. The movie Rashaman--I don’t know how
many of you ever saw it, the famous Japanese movie where there were
different angles of vision of a particular sequence of events, a
mystery, a murder. The point is that there are always many
points of view. Nobody is empty-minded; the problem is that
many people aren’t opened minded. They aren’t willing
to acknowledge that there are questions that they’re not asking,
and there are people with perspectives that they’re not reaching
out to. So we have a situation, even when you get on CNN, as
I’ve been on CNN, it’s like wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. Quick
sound byte, response, sound byte, response, thank you, goodbye. There’s
no time in a structure to really develop an argument, make a perspective,
and as a consequence, I would argue that a lot of what we think we
know about what’s happening in the world actually we don’t
know very much about. I just completed a film on what happened
in Flori-duh, with a “duh,” at the end. One of
the best covered stories--an election that has already gone down
in history as bizarre, which gave us a president of these United
States that we now have: Five hundred and thirty-seven votes between
the two candidates. The Supreme Court steps in. Lo and
behold, 175,000 votes go uncounted. Not 20. Not 50. Not
100. Not 200--175,000 votes, duh! Is anybody interested? Did
anybody follow up on it? Did anybody analyze it really and
explain it? Why is it that there were 300 news organizations
in Palm Beach, Florida, when the recount started and yet not one
of them had before the election talked about the problems of voting
in Florida where there had been problems over the last 15 years!? Not
only the exclusion and disenfranchisement of black voters, not only
the fact that the Justice Department had several counties under legal
restraint because of malpractices in the past, not only because of
chads and machines that weren’t working in the same precincts
that they didn’t work again in the year 2000. Nobody
covered it! Nobody thought about it! The election was
framed as Bush vs. Gore! That was it! What the voters,
the experience of the voters, the people on whom our democracy is
premised--that didn’t matter! I read a little book about
this that these folks from Germany called “Hail To The Thief,” and
I have my own butterfly ballot on the cover and on my butterfly ballot
is ABC, CBS, and all the news organizations that covered the election. So
we did this analysis. I got these people from Germany to look
at our election week by week in terms of the coverage of, using this
technique of anally compulsive analysis. We saw certain patterns
of coverage. For one thing, the election got half the coverage
that the election in 1996 got. Did you know that? Most
of the coverage was put on the cable channels, not on the networks. Most
of the coverage on the networks went from prime time, when most people
watched, to the early morning shows. And the Sunday morning
shows. Politics was de-politicized in our own media. Only
50 percent of the people even voted. Of the 50 percent of the
people who voted, 25 percent of them said they were only voting for
the candidate they were supporting because they hated the other guy. So
only 12 percent really wanted Bush to win to begin with, of the eligible
voters. Who made that point? Nobody. Who looked
at, in real scrutiny, not only the campaign finance issues in that
election, but the fact revealed afterwards that American television
stations were overcharging the candidates for the airtime they were
selling them. Were actually in violation of federal law! In
other words, the media was part of the campaign finance scandal because
most of the money raised goes where? Right. Into the
media. So in a sense, they have a stake in not having any reform
and any change, and that’s why the issues of finance reform
are so poorly explained. And at the last minute, attempts to
restrain television stations and mandate-free airtime was stricken
from the so-called reform that was passed through the intervention
of the broadcast industry’s lobbying arm. The broadcast
industry’s lobbying arm had donated a tremendous amount of
money to the political parties. So actually part of the system,
the idea that there’s a media out here, there’s politics
over there, that’s the classic view. The reality is what
I call a media-ocricy. A media merger. You know, we’ve
talked a lot about mergers, but a merger between politics and media.
You can’t have an election today if you don’t have media. And
media is an essential part of the whole political process. So
if you see it as part of the process, you understand the function
and role that it plays. To do that, you need some sort of institutional
analysis, not just an analysis of personalities. Yes, there
are people within the system who really are committed and struggle
every day with words and sound bytes and what are they going to put
in and what are they going to take out. I went through this,
and I’m still going through this, because even as an independent,
a so-called independent producer, I know what I can get on the air
and what I can’t. I know that if it appears to be partisan
in any way…In Miami, Dade County, the recount was taking place. Do
you remember this? And there was a group of people who were
protesting inside the place where the recount was happening. And
it was described as a public protest. Then it was revealed
that the people who were protesting were all members of congressional
staffs that had been sent there by Tom “The Hammer” DeLay,
the former Texas exterminator who became a politician as an extreme
right-winger. His counterpart probably it would be, if not
Bin Laden, somebody like that in terms of overall fundamentalism
and fanaticism. These were the people who demonstrated Miami,
Dade County, and as the recount was beginning to show more votes
for Al Gore, the recount was shut down. In my film I wrote,
in my script I wrote, Tom “The Hammer” DeLay. That’s
what he’s known as. Republicans love to call him the “The
Hammer” because they think that’s cool. But I had
to take that out, because I thought that would sound too partisan. So
language and words and what you include and what you chose not to
include is part of the process. This isn’t really the
structured talk that I had spent hours preparing, but I’m reacting
in a sense to your style and your energy of both wanting to show
you work and then understanding what the constraints we’re
operating under, and how do you tell these stories and how do you
make people feel them, not just think about them, because as The
Honorable Robert Nester Marley once said, “Them that feels
it, knows it.” You know? If stories don’t
connect with you, if you don’t have an empathetic connection
on some level with the suffering of other people or with their reality,
it’s going to come right in one ear and out the other. It’s
going to be like a wave over you. That’s why a lot of
Americans don’t tune it to news and information because they
don’t feel it connects to their lives. They don’t
feel like it connects to their lives because very few people help
them make the connections with their own lives. The context,
as you said, is missing. So if you have information that’s
decontextualized, it doesn’t have a larger frame work to it,
it doesn’t seem to connect, it’s not relevant to you,
it doesn’t matter, and hence we have a situation where a large
number of people in this country don’t know much about anything. I
was just at a discussion this morning out at Stony Brook University
on class in America and there was a survey cited of, for the first
time, less than 50 percent of the American people know what a union
is. Literally. Is that a surprise? We have five
business channels. How many labor channels? How much
news and information is there about working people? How much
of a bottom-up approach to news and information is there? Very
little. But every fluctuation of the stock market is reported
when it happens. Now the irony of all that, of course, is just
parenthetically, is that in a sense markets were not made to be measured
by the second. So when you report on a fluctuation, you’re
actual reporting influences the direction that the stock is taking
and there are actually people now who think that the whole collapse
of the whole tech sector had a lot to do with the coverage of it,
the kind of hyper coverage of it actually contributed not the people
buying, but the people selling. You remember in the aftermath
of September 11, we couldn’t get the stock market up fast enough
to show America was back at work. People worked around the
clock, 24-hours a day, laying cable, getting the wires in, getting
the phones in, and what happened? The minute it opened it went
into the toilet! They were sorry they opened it! Americans
are fighting back! They’ll invest in America! Bologna!!! Get
my money out of there! So the reality of things is often quite
different than a lot of the realities presented. I won’t get
into this with you now, but the whole incident in Afghanistan. Two
of your stories. Story one says Karzai is saying, “These
people attacked me, it was a political effort.” Story
two, two days later, the guy is saying, “Well, there was no
political aspect, it was a personal issue.” So the initial
impression, which is the impression most of us have and it’s
reported based on what our available facts are at the time, can turn
out to be 100 percent wrong! Okay? Not your fault. It’s
not everyday. But it’s something that unless you have
a framework and you can get back the significance of what’s
going on, you don’t catch that! And as a result, you
don’t ask questions about it.
Let
me just tell you a little bit about myself, if you’re interested. I’ve
written a book called The More You Watch, The Less You Know,
and that book is based on my experiences working inside ABC and inside
CNN, and why I think it’s interesting, besides it being my
glorious story, is that there are very few books about what it’s
like to actually work in these institutions. You have a lot
of memoirs of famous people after they’ve left television,
but you have very little from the shop floor, if you will, of what
it’s like inside. The second book, News Dissector:
Passions, Pieces, and Polemics is a collection of political articles
that I’ve written while I was doing other things like reporting
from Vietnam, from the South in the Civil Rights Movement, being
spied upon. When I read about the concern about the CIA and
the FBI, like how could they miss this? I don’t
know if you saw the story yesterday in the New York Times where Mohammad
Ata had come to a woman’s office to try to get a loan to buy
a crop duster, okay? She says he doesn’t qualify for
the loan and he says, “Well, what if I just reach behind you
and strangle you to death?” and she said, “I wouldn’t
do that, I’m a martial arts expert,” you know? So
he backed off. It’s one of these nice little stories
that was buried in the New York Times. Then he says, “Well
what if I reach behind you and steal all the money that’s in
your safe?” and she says, “There’s no money in
the safe, so steal away.” Then he says, “You should
work for us, for the great Osama Bin Laden,” and the woman,
and this is a member or the government, said she didn’t know
who he was talking about. Now did Osama Bin Laden’s name
just surface after September 11? No! What happened in
East Africa? This has been going a war that’s been going
on for a long time. If you remember, there was a trial in New
York City in August. In one federal courtroom the terrorists
from East Africa were revealing their cell structure, they were revealing
how they were organized and how they were structured and how they
were going to kick Uncle Sam’s ass! Straight out! In
the courthouse! That’s in Courtroom A. No coverage. In
Courtroom B Puffy Combs trial was taking place. The courthouse
was surrounded, live, 24-hour coverage of Puffy’s trial. But
something that would affect us; almost no coverage. Gary Hart
issued a report with Sandra Rudman warning of an imminent terrorist
attack. He revealed it on the Saturday before September 11
in Montreal, Canada! No coverage! So were there signs
so the CIA couldn’t get it together? Wow! Am I
surprised!
CIA
file: Informants report. 1967. Denny Schechter
{misspelled}. About 25. Believed to be a U.S. citizen. Schechter
speaks poor French. He is at present a student at London School
of Economics where at least two of his friends, name unknown, are
Cuban students. Appearance: Funky. He is about six feet
tall with a round face and a white pimply skin. He wears his
hair short in a sort of bouffant hairdo. More commonly seen
in women. Appears to be in good health and to be an energetic
person with organizational skills. He was able to fill the
auditorium at the London School of Economics. He speaks rapidly
with authority, but he does not give the impression of being bossy. His
main characteristic is that of an odd but friendly person who is
strongly devoted to a cause.
Your
CIA tax dollars at work in 1967. I don’t think it’s
changed all that much, folks. I think part of the problem is
the inability to decode other cultures because we live in a basic
society that is in contempt of other people, not only what they have
to say, but their concerns, and people who are not conforming to
an image. Minorities in this country have experienced that
for a long time, but now it’s becoming clear that it’s
a life and death issue affecting all of us. American policy
around the world is something that is creating a harvest of anger,
fury, rage, and war that our generation and other generations are
going to be coping with. The reality of Afghanistan, when you
saw those mobs outside that soccer stadium, is that this ain’t
over folks. The impression one gets is we went in, boom, bop,
we did it and it’s over. Well, it’s not over. I
covered Vietnam for many, many years and I was there. And we
all kept talking about the light at the end of the tunnel, and when
we got to the end of the tunnel, there was no light. So there
are lessons of history, and there are forces of reality that have
to be confronted.
Anyway,
my own work as a journalist writing about these issues led me, about
two years ago, to try to see what I could do about the media system. We
had been covering human rights around the world. We had done
a program with Charlayne Hunter-Gault, the great civil rights activist
turned correspondent, the leading African-American journalist now
CNN Bureau Chief in Johannesburg, South Africa. We wanted to
do a show on human rights. We went to PBS. PBS’s
response? Charlayne Hunter-Gault? Twelve Emmy Awards. Interesting. The
leading contradiction in the post cold-war world? Interesting. Producers
who have won many Emmy Awards? Sounds promising. But,
no. Sorry folks. “Human rights is not a sufficient
organizing principal for a TV series.” Quote, unquote. Unlike
cooking. Cooking is a sufficient organizing principal. (Laughter) So
we had this whole series, but we couldn’t get it on the air. Finally
we did, going station by station, it got a lot of attention, but
what we saw once again is that the gatekeepers, that the people who
are running the media show, were standing in the way between information
that people wanted and needed, and in fact with the program did get
on the air, the ratings always improved on the show before it, and
did very well, which was why it was renewed for years, every 13 weeks! Because
people were watching it! If nobody was watching it, they wouldn’t
have kept it on. Believe me. So the point here is that
certain conventional logics prevent discussion of a lot of these
issues. So one of the things that I’m trying to do--who
was working with this? Could you help me get on line? Thank
you.
Working
with some of my colleagues we created something called The Media
Channel. In my book, the last chapter, I basically threw
out this idea. What if there was a media channel to monitor
all the other channels. Well, we couldn’t do it on television
because we could probably never get it on the air, but we could do
it on line. We started in the year 2000 with 20 organizations
that agreed to be a part of it. Today, about a week ago, we
signed up our 1,000th affiliate. That’s the
world’s largest media issues network. Mediachannel.org. Our
lead advisor, when I was trying to think about who should be the
public face of it, everybody’s saying “Call Noam Chomsky.” I
said, I have another idea. I went to Walter Cronkite. Walter
Cronkite not only agreed but also did a statement for us that made
me sound like a moderate. And Walter Cronkite and 93 other
advisors in 63 countries, and we’ve created this network. Can
we go to mediachannel.org? Is that possible? Using advanced
technology at Columbia University. . .
We
created this network to bring all the organizations that are involved
in media together under one virtual roof and to try to offer a place
for ongoing information and analysis about the media system. So
I want to tell you about it because it’s a resource and we
have also carried a number of articles about photography, we have
a little bit of an on-line gallery. This is an attempt to try
to show that there’s a tremendous number of people who are
interested and concerned about media issues, that it’s not
just a handful of people, but a thousand organizations, the starters,
and what we’ve been able to do with this is we’re up
to about 3.5 million hits a month. I’m writing a daily
web log about media issues and I welcome you to not only check it
out and sign up for our weekly email, but also to participate--to
send in items, comments and the like. So here it is. What
Mediachannel has done is that we offer news and information. This
is News Dissector’s web log updated daily. Here’s
daily media news. Here’s our affiliates. And as
you scroll down, you realize that media is a global problem. The
African Women’s Media Center, afro-net, Middle East Gateway. Access
to a whole world of information just about the media of some of the
best scholarship, the best advocacy, the most interesting analysis,
and also a search engine that helps you find access to a lot of resources
that you wouldn’t find. So for example, if you went to
Google.com and you put in “Rupert Murdock,” you’d
get 60 million references or whatever. In our case, you would
get maybe 800 really informed and intelligent articles. I’m
not doing too well here, am I. But here, the unusual sources,
the usual news. This is the study that was just done that we
just talked about. This is one study on what’s on the
news that we’ve done from the group fair, but then also this
is a study, a project on excellence in journalism on the war on terrorism
which offers a detailed analysis of what actually is being reported
and has not been reported done by very credible journalists with
no particular agenda politically, except an agenda to try to improve
media coverage. What we’re offering here, as we scroll
down and see, is a wide range of news analysis, resources, etc. In
the course of our work we came to see that if you look at international
news in America, the top 50 websites, all but two carry only two
sources of news which is Reuters and AP. So what we’re
trying to do now is create a syndication engine, a company that offers
more diverse news and information from around the world. We’ve
signed up about 260 news providers from around the world, and we’re
doing something called The News Shadow. So, for example, here’s
CNN. We’re taking CNN and New York Times, just to demonstrate
this, and we’re shadowing their coverage, which is to say we’re
not critiquing or refuting it, but we’re offering other perspectives
on the same stories from, in this case, Asia Times, The Gold Star
Daily from the Philippines, the Star Network. CNN on South
Asia. Here’s The Gulf News, The Times of India, etc.,
offering inside-out news and information about what’s happening. Here’s
the New York Times on Arafat. Here’s Jerusalem Post,
which is the left wing paper in Israel; Jerusalem Post is the right
wing newspaper in Israel, Palestinian sources and what have you. So
the idea here is this is really a showcase of what we’re doing,
but the goal here is to try to syndicate this so that we’re
not just about critiquing media or criticizing it, but we’re
also in there trying to change it. In order to do that, we
want to do that very practically and very credibly by working with
our colleagues around the world who might do great reporting in a
given country, for example, here’s a translated story, “Dissent
roils beneath Russians calm surface.” So what we found
was that when the American media at CNN was saying, “Bin Laden’s
in Pakistan,” our sources in Uzbekistan and Iran were saying, “No! Iran
is more likely.” We reported that. Three days later
Rumsfeld came out and gave a press conference and said that Iran
is part of the “axis of evil” and intimating that they
think Bin Laden is in Iran. So actually factual information
from news sources that we consider trustworthy and not always trustworthy,
let’s put it this way, not always informed, even though the
anchors are very authoritative. So this is the GV News Net
that I call to your attention. Again, you can sign up and get
a free 30-day trial of what we’re doing. Whether we can
survive and make this work is a big challenge because we’re
like ants in an age of elephants. We have media mergers in
concentration. Ten years ago 50 companies controlled the U.S.
media, now media is a global enterprise, five to seven companies
are dominating it. Our own company also has a website with
some of our programs, so these are from some of the documentaries
and programs that Globalvision has done because we’re also
image makers, we believe that television should be more than wallpaper,
that it should be driven by visuals and you’ll find access
to some of our stories. This is a program that we’ve
done about AIDS orphans. We were one of the first companies
to talk about AIDS orphans. We were the first company to do a major
special on globalization in 1998. We’re trying to do
programming that’s on the edge, but also programming that raises
the important issues of our times. It’s a struggle to
do it. We’re undercapitalized terrible. It’s
very hard to compete when you don’t have--do we have Real Player
here? Oh, I guess I can’t show you. We can have
the lights back on.
So
this is an effort on line to do journalism with a difference. We
want to make a difference, we also want to make a living. That’s
our challenge: How do you do that? How do you have two bottom
lines in your work? One bottom line to try to give something
back and try to reflect the values that you care about; the other
bottom line is to try to bring in enough money to keep the company
going and pay your bills. We’ve been functioning for
16 years now, so we’ve been doing something right, but it’s
getting harder, not easier, because of the media environment that
we’re in and the reluctance on the part of the left liberal
community that’s very aware of the imbalance of media to put
any resources into media. If you look at the top ten right-wing
foundations in America, media is number one and is number two on
the list in terms of what they actually fund and support. If
you look at the liberal foundations, media is not even on the list. It’s
almost an afterthought. So in order to get money, to get support
for not-for-profit ventures and public interest initiatives, it’s
an uphill battle. To get funding for programs I’m doing
the American Elections 2000, a documentary investigative report with
a woman named Faye Anderson, meeting African-American journalists
on what happened on the disenfranchisement of voters, we had a very
hard time getting money. I finally got some money from the
owner of a baseball team, to my surprise. But a lot of my time
has to be spent raising money, when I’d like it to be spent
making programming. That’s the challenge that you have
when you’re on the outside as an independent producer. How
much time do I have, because I could show a little something or I
could not.
Younger: Sure,
go ahead. I just want to ask you one question. What if
they had some like really fabulous piece that they developed, got
a lot of research and got the backup and go ahead--is there a place
for that on television?
Schechter: Well
Globalvision is not a network. Right now we’re talking
to Magnum Photo Agency, we’re interested in maybe coming up
with some kind of partnership, but we have the means of production,
we don’t have the means of distribution.
Since
we were talking about September 11, I want to show you a little project
that I worked on. I can only show you a few minutes of it,
but in the aftermath of September 11, 200 artists got together here
in New York led by Nile Rogers who did the song, We Are Family,
with a goal of doing a project to promote tolerance, because there
was a whole spike of hate crimes that were underway. This film
is a documentary. Spike Lee did the music video; I did the
documentary. So we had all this celebrity power that were involved
with this project. Spike Lee. Nile Rogers. A rather
soft message, the idea being that, as opposed to the flag-waving,
patriotism that was the official message, this was a call for tolerance
and a sense of global humanity. There were artists from other
countries, Pakistan, England, Europe, who were a part of this effort,
representing all of the genres of music, members of the Nicks, the
Rangers. You can’t be more mainstream! It got selected
and was the hit of the Sundance Film Festival. I was interviewed
for 20 minutes by CNN Live from Park City and in the course of my
interview I pitched the program that CNN Presents. Not interested. Not
interested because they have a certain concept of what they’re
doing and they will only do that concept. So, so far we have
been unable to get this on the air in America, even though it played
for a week in Tribeca and got good reviews and was written about
in the L.A. Times, Reuters, A.P., and Sundance. We got a standing
ovation. So I want to give you a little taste of it. We
try to deal with the crisis, but the talk really more personally
about artists getting together, across racial divides, across cultural
divides, in the ways that you rarely see, and even then, Spike Lee’s
own video was not accepted by MTV or VH1. So here’s the
problem that we’re up against. Even offering a message
that doesn’t even challenge the dominant message, but just
simply offers another perspective, is often screened out. Take
a look. We Are Family. This is an example of popular
culture commenting on serious issues, and trying to get it seen and
heard.
(Video)
(Applause)
Schechter: There
was an ambiance here that really did not reflect the national cry
for blood and the whole patriotic response which was sort of whipped
up. That response was kind of lost in part because the media
kind of switched into “America Fights Back” mode. So
this film captured something that happened 10-days afterwards, I
think with a lot of power and movement and passion, and we’re
still hoping to get it seen more widely We Are Family, because
we think the message, the sense of being a family, globally as opposed
to being nations, is a progressive and positive response to a crisis. So
that’s part of our work at Globalvision, to do films like this,
and I’m very proud of it. Had a great response, but having
a hell of a time getting it seen. Just because it doesn’t
fit in the structural framework of what’s permissible, how
to think about it and talk about it. Some of the people who
did see it, we got a lot of really good reviews, but there were a
few really hostile ones that were really hostile at celebrity--“How
dare celebrities say anything,” at the same time those same
publications are total celebrity fuckers on every level and use celebrities
shamelessly to promote circulation, viewership, ratings and the like,
and on the other hand, when these people actually speak their hears
and minds, they’re not welcome or they’re ridiculed and
made fun of in a very climate of great cynicism. What time
is it? Okay I’m going to get a ticket and if I do I’m
going to give it to you because I’m running behind here, okay?
The
final video that I want to show you is that we all live in these
worlds of contradictions.
(End
of tape)
Or,
we’re in a world of on the one hand access, work on the streets
and access to the sweets. So we had the bizarre experience
of being invited, tiny little Globalvision, to do the opening video
for the World Economic Forum that met at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. We
got the invitation through a producer in South Africa, the first
black film producer there, who proposed that we do it together and
come up with something for the World Economic Forum which was the
meeting at the Waldorf that happened, as you know, surrounded by
14,000 soldiers and police and everything else and became the symbol
of globalization. Politically we were probably more supportive
of the critics. On the other hand, here was an opportunity
to offer a message to focus our values to this audience of 3,000
rulers of the world, if you will. So there you are in the main
ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria and the first speaker was The Honorable,
Majesty, Lord of the Universe, Rudy Giuliani. The next speaker
was the Governor of New York, Mr. Pataki. The next speaker
was Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, who purchased the job for
72 million dollars. You know, we live in a TV system where
we have Bloomberg for the classes and Jerry Springer for the masses. Anyway,
Michael Bloomberg speaks and then it’s our turn. We try
to vibe in to what we felt was the dominate mood which was a sense
that there’s the end of hope in a way, and what we wanted to
try to do was offer some inspiration using imagery and text, not
a documentary because the whole conference was a documentary, so
we wanted to do something that was inspiring and we called it The
Darkest Hour Is Just Before Dawn, and this is a little video
for the World Economic Forum, shown for the first time north of 110th Street.
(Laughter)
(Video)
Audience: I
was just wondering--
Schechter: Tell
me your name.
Audience: I’m
sorry. Deborah Jack. You were talking about the fact
that the media abroad gives a different story, and I guess lately
I’ve sort of seen that kind of difference in the sense of the
internet and the role that that plays in helping people become informed. So
I was just wondering, how do you see the media here in this country
being able to change a system that seems to be really sort of tied
up in itself?
Schechter: Earlier,
Mark Crispin Miller was saying that CNN Domestic has 500,000 viewers. That’s
the size essentially of a big radio station in a given city. In
other words, a lot of what we’re seeing are mirrors. After
the Monica Lewinsky, our year of the lady of Monica, every media
mogul said “We’re only giving people what they want. When
we put a Monica story on, our ratings go up! See? That’s
what people want!” Now the problem with this logic is
that there are two indexes that measure television programs. One
is the rating, which we all know about, and the other is the share. The
share is how many people were actually watching television. So
the ratings went up. So a program on MSNBC went from a one
to a two. Doubled! Phenomenal! The producer was
very proud of himself. The actual number of people watching
is not very significant, and in fact, at the end of that year, TV
viewing for television news was off by two million viewers! So
actually the net affect of this hyper competition and reliance of
the story was to drive a growing audience away from television news. Now
that could be positive, that could be negative, they’re seeking
out other information, that would be good. If they’re
not, maybe that’s not so good. My point is that American
television exists in a cultural context and it reflects the culture
as well as shapes the culture. It has a kind of double affect. It
seems to me that a lot of what you watch become your visual language,
the story of that man cleaning the grave, even though it was about
the king returning, and the king returned only to say that he’s
not going to have anything to do with politics and most people were
very happy about that although the story would suggest otherwise. Nevertheless,
those images stuck in my mind. When I saw it I thought it was
very beautifully done, and I remembered that. When you think
about how much of it is really memorable, what are the moments in
television viewing that get you that you can remember--the majority
of people in America who were alive at the time thought they saw
Kennedy shot on TV. There was no footage of Kennedy being shot
on TV. Years later, there was this film that showed one piece
of the assassination, showed his head going back and the rest, but
that wasn’t shown for years after. Four years after the
fact. Many of us have a memory that may not correspond with
the reality. So how do you change it? First of all I
think there are three to four ways. One, we need media literacy
education in our schools. We need to pay more attention to
educating people about media, and on some levels our kids are the
most media-savvy generation ever, but everybody always says this: “I’m
not affected. Nobody tells me what to think. I think
for myself.” And yet when you ask people who say that,
give them an opinion poll, you’ll find a striking similarity
in the views that you get back! So it’s like garbage
in, garbage out. Of course they’re affected by this whole
media environment. So we have to start thinking about this
in terms of an environment, just like we talk about the environment
of air, water, climate, we have to think of the cultural environment
that we live in and how that influences and creates space for interesting
and different programming, or closes it off. How bad institutions
happen to bad people. And we need to think about those issues. So
media literacy education to me is something that’s important. Something
like 4,000 schools in America offer something like it, we’re
a media channel, we’re offering all kinds of resources to teachers,
lesson plans, things that they can use in the classroom, to help
educate kids. Yeah, it’s on the website and we’re
hoping to be able to expand that with some new funding. So
that’s one area that we think is very important. Another
area is to try to get parents more interested and concerned about
television so they can actually experience what their kids are watching
and are drawn to and actually talk about it with their kids. We
think that’s very important. Then I think the other thing
is that there’s a whole movement of corporate responsibility. The
World Economic Forum on the good side of it, encourages that kind
of debate. But the media section in it, there was none of that. There
was no challenge there to the media moguls, you know, the head of
AOL was there, the head of Universal was there. There needs
to be more of a debate within the media business and you know, media
business there’s a great deal of fragmentation and decline. Two
hundred thousand have lost their jobs in the media sector in the
last two years. It’s not a good time for people to be
adventurous, you know, people refer to it as the “unbrave world
of media.” So the challenge is to try to encourage and
strengthen the impulse and instinct of journalists to talk about
their work, the find forums to discuss it, the try to encourage other
organizations and the society to be concerned. You know, when
I was working at 20/20, if I got 5 letters on a given story, a primetime
audience at that point of 12 million or more people, that would be
incredibly successful, because most television doesn’t encourage
interactivity, they don’t want people, they want you to take
an instant poll, you know? “Bomb Baghdad or not!” Call
this number, of course you end up paying 50 cents to express your
opinion, they end up getting half the money, and the telephone provider
gets the other half with they don’t really reveal to you, and
it’s a phony, non-scientific kind of sampling of opinion. It’s
used more as an entertainment tool of building a phone list and then
go back and solicit those people with sales of Time Magazine or other
properties of the media company.
Audience: And
it absolves your responsibility from actually looking at the issue,
like what happens if we bomb. . .
Schechter: Right,
right. My point is I think there are a lot of things we can
do, but one of the things we can start doing which I’m doing
with you now, is to try to talk about these issues and get them on
the agenda, get them in the front lobe of our own consciousness and
start thinking about it, because I think that leads to all kinds
of idea of letters to the editor, of encounters with other journalists,
of holding to people to a higher ethical standard. We’re
doing that now in the stock market. We’re doing that
with corporations. Why not media corporations? You know,
soap has to meet a certain standard. What about new? How
about rating that? And I think a lot of these ideas are maybe
ahead of their time, but if I’m right about that 70 percent,
I think there’s a big group of people who are increasingly
open to this perspective, and I find that what I thought would be
a very--the Chairman of the Board of Globalvision is the former president
of CBS, so people who grew up in that system and see how it’s
gotten distorted and everything they built is now part of promoting
Survivor or Big Brother or Blind Date, programs like that, they’re
concerned about it! We aren’t necessarily on the same
wavelength on every issue, but the point is that they want to try
to promote and support this. I got a corporate underwriter
on media channel. Why? Because this company was misreported
on and as a result of the misreporting, their stock price went into
the toilet and a guy lost his job and they were really pissed off! They
had no way to fight back! And they’re like a multi-zillion
dollar company! So you have a need for higher ethical standards,
and I think that that in itself is revolutionary in this particular
climate. But we’re in an environment where information
and entertainment, you know, there’s been a merger of newsbiz
and showbiz, and that has undercut the information, the loyalty and
fidelity to information is something that people need. The
idea of giving people what they want is the drug dealer’s argument.
Want to get high? Here you go. You know? On one
level we would be totally opposed to that, but somehow when it comes
to marketing news and information, that’s the values that we
adopt. Giving the people what they want. When in fact
we know that our society needs informed citizens. That’s
the whole essence of democracy. Take that out of the equation
and what are you left with? Corporate-ocracy. That’s
really what the key issue is. I’ll stop ranting.
Audience: I
have a question basically for both of you. In building a story
is there a certain amount, like we saw his nice pieces, like there’s
the baseball field, but you didn’t really choose. Is
there a percentage of news that you have to do versus social commentary?
Schechter: He
is a general assignment reporter. I was one. You get
assigned a story, a different story every day, whatever’s breaking,
whatever’s in the news. I will say to you, however, an
unknown to you, you are being spoken to by the former deputy coach
of the Greenwich Village Little League, and it was my field that
they messed with, so I have a personal stake at getting back at Osama
for messing up that Little League field where my daughter pitched.
Palmer: Yeah,
the balance. We can talk in a general sense. If you look
at what the networks including CNN are covering, it tends to be less
hard news sort of stuff. Breaking news trumps everything, so
September 11 was September 11 all the time and then they’re
looking for whatever will fill the gap after that, and the 24-hour
news networks are different from the other networks, but I think
that because of the corporatization, because of the bureaucratization,
and because of the fact that advertisers really do drive coverage,
not in terms of “they dictate” what gets on, it’s
that you have to attract the advertisers so you get the money, and
you have to attract the viewer, so I would say that a lot of what
we’re getting, and we talked about this before, is personal
tragedy as public spectacle or public spectacle as news. So
in terms of how it breaks down at CNN, it’s really weird, it’s
really different because we have so many networks and I serve different
constituencies, like I do occasionally do stuff for CNN International
which doesn’t really make it onto CNN Domestic, but I would
say probably half of my stories are breaking news kind of stories,
the rest are socially tethered stories, not necessarily of any great
import, but as far as the deep investigative, Okay, George Bush is
talking about completely overhauling the welfare system again, could
we possibly do a profile of someone who’s benefited from Welfare
To Work and someone who hasn’t. That’s not the
kind of stuff that you’re generally going to see on the air,
unless A) you have a correspondence who pushes it, or B) you have
a producer at a very high level who pushes it and C) if there’s
a news peg and D) if there’s nothing else sexier going on that
day. That’s the chain of causality that you have to get
through.
Audience: This
is a question that I guess probably ends up being a little more philosophical
or even personal, but I’m just wondering how, I mean, I consider
myself an informed viewer, listener, reader of the news, and I do
tend to assume that there is another side of the story or see beyond
that and see the differences in how things are reported, but when
I think about how – I mean, it doesn’t matter how aware
I am or how active I am in this, I’m still dealing with the
consequences of an uninformed public, and a president who has the
literacy of a kindergartner in the highest office in the land. And
I think about Bill Clinton being able to be prosecuted for a sexual
harassment case while he was in office, that passing, and yet George
Bush isn’t allowed to be for something that’s much more
important while he’s in office, or the Monica Lewinsky case
getting so much press and then Enron, which has gotten a lot of press,
the fact that billions of people have been affected by this and that
the government has been involved in some way, and that’s not
being covered to the same extent at all. So we’re living
with the consequences of the government that’s in power, everything
that’s been happening, I’m just wondering how to maintain
optimism because you can’t – it’s really difficult.
Schechter: I
guess when you said “kind of personal,” I guess one reaches
back into your life and your life experience and right now I’m
wrestling because this is the month I turn 60, so from 1960 to 60
I don’t know what happened. And when I think back on
the various issues that I’ve been involved in, starting as
a civil rights activist and seeing that despite terrible struggle
and the loss of lives of people I knew and everything else, changes
were made. Apartheid in South Africa, being involved in something
and believing that change was possible and it happened because of
the sacrifice against people. The fight against the war in
Vietnam. It happened. Unfortunately we have to replay
these dramas a lot, but my sense is that change is possible, change
in fact is the only constant, and that a lot of the lies and deceptions
and contradictions will come out and have been coming out. Nixon,
I was there for the re-election and two years later he was fleeing
Washington. I’m not naïve about this, in fact I
sometimes get very despondent about it. I have tried to put
my energy into work that I think is positive and uplifting and trying
to offer information to people with both solid analysis and some
kind of hopeful spin, and the people that do see it tend to be moved
by it so I get enough satisfaction to keep going, although it is
a very difficult situation. The irony is that here I am in
this small company with a big idea banging away for all these years,
and yet a lot of the high and the mighty, the greats of our industry
have had meteoric rises and tremendous falls. I believe that
these people will fall, too. I think that the lies and deceptions
will unravel and hopefully the media can play a part in it if it
isn’t totally absorbed into the system, which we fear is happening. I
think that’s where you come in. I think ultimately it’s
not them, it’s you. It’s like we said in this video,
you have to be the change you want to see in the world, in your own
work you have to find the values and the commitment on some level
and that’s the best you can do. Hopefully if you can
do it in some kind of community with others, you’ll feel more
strengthened by that, learn more that way. That’s the
kind of work that I’m trying to do. I wouldn’t
say that if you look at the arc of American history, I feel like
we’re going in reverse right now on many levels, but hopefully
there will be a corrective here and that enough people will wake
up to this and begin to stand up to it. So I would just say
that even though truth crushed to earth will rise again, if you believe
in that and you work in your own way to make it happen, you could
be surprised that it will happen and it’s happened in my life.
I’m just saying that yes, there are these negative trends and
forces that are overpowering at times, and that’s what this
video is about, Darkness And Light, this battle that the place
to find light is in darkness, and that’s what we were all searching
for in some way. I don’t want to be evangelical here,
but I do believe that. And I think a lot of it comes down ultimately
to you as a person, your character, the strength of your commitment
to what you care about, whether you’re able and willing to
put some time and energy into things that matter.
Palmer: And
I think that you as an audience do have some power, agency or whatever
you want to call it, because I know that CNN producers and the people,
the executives, the people above producers and people at networks,
they do pay attention to intelligent letter-writers and people who
do say, “listen, we can’t stand for this,” or “you
folks have been neglecting this,” and I think that that’s
something that people really need to do. If you care at all
about the coverage, one of the things I said at the very, very beginning
is that you can work outside the mainstream, you can work in it,
but regardless of where you position yourself, you have to realize
that as a cultural producer, the people you are trying to reach are
going to be saturated in the mainstream media, the R. Kelly, the
Mike Tyson, and the CNN and the New York Post and the Daily News
and that kind of lowest-common-denominator journalism and lowest-common-denominator
culture, and I think you have to find creative ways to both change
that culture, and to let people know there are alternatives and hell,
they can create alternatives, too!
Younger: I
just want to say thanks to you guys very much!
(Applause)
Schechter
Analysis
by
Mark Slankard
According
to media producer and critic Danny Schechter, 70 percent of Americans
believe that the media “sucks”. Similarly, 70 percent
of journalists are dissatisfied with the media they participate in
creating. It’s evident that today, there is an open hostility
towards the media. It is the media’s perceived responsibility
to create an informed public necessary for our system of participatory
democracy. Schechter said that while it is the media’s
responsibility to inform the democratic process, there is no comparable
democratic discussion going on within the media.
Marshall
McLuhan called TV “pervasively invisible” because it
has the appearance of transparency and neutrality. As a result,
it remains largely unexamined. Schechter’s approach to
media calls for not only an analysis of individual stories and agendas,
but also a broader institutional analysis that considers story selection,
time limitations, responsibility to parent companies and advertisers,
historical context, and formal structures of delineating limits of
what may or may not enter into the discourse. Echoing the sentiments
of Mark Crispin Miller, Schechter explained that the priority in
corporate culture is profit--not the integrity of information. Journalists
are conditioned to respond in the “appropriate way” to
the corporate culture in which they operate. While this conditioning
can be overt, it is most often a tacit understanding of what is and
isn’t permissible. This has the net effect of corporate
agendas being presented as fair, balanced and accurate by a selection
process that is anything but. Corporate media play the role
of the farmer and the gatekeeper of possibilities.
Schechter
advocates and practices “bottom-up journalism” in order
to combat the framing of debate as a reflection of profit interests.
Like all independent media, Schechter’s website MediaChannel.org
and his television production company, Globalvision, have the potential
for generating a counter-view to the limited confines of big money,
TV journalism. Both venues publish stories that function outside
the profit motive or other corporate interests. It allows for
the possibility of critical analysis and examination of, not only
the issues being dealt with in the media, but also how they
are being dealt with and what is not being dealt with.
The
confinement of debate in mainstream media is propagated by the exclusion
of extreme points of view. Maintaining a critical perspective
requires a plurality of voices and tools in order to discern that
which has been omitted. But this critique neglects to note
that the tools necessary for understanding media can potentially
come with self-interested ideological baggage of their own. Is there
room for critical self-reflection beyond an oppositional position
toward mainstream media?
Finally,
in strictly formal terms, Schechter’s Globalvision Productions
seem to do little to break out of the bounds that cause voices to
be restrained. Both of his productions entitled, We Are
Family and The Darkest Hour is Just Before the Dawn, use
formulaic devices to induce sentimentality that doesn’t seem
to correspond with the ideal of media literacy that he advocates. His
analysis of media seems to be altogether more effective and engaging
than his productions. But, can the fusing of the two to create
an informed, intelligent and socially responsible media production
that may be used to displace the current corporate dominance?