Danny Schechter, Author at Toward Freedom

Winning the Marathon

Danny Schechter June 28, 2005 Danny Schechter

To succeed and thrive, we’ll need to make media and democracy the main issues

Those of us who have been in media for a while have seen the system’s transformation. We’ve seen the emergence of fewer and fewer companies, dominating more and more of the media spectrum. We’ve seen a merger between news biz and show biz. We’ve seen a dramatic cutback in news of the world.

On MediaChannel.org, we published a study that compares the extent of political knowledge in the US to six other countries, and finds that Americans are the least informed of any people in the world. The reason? US television. Americans depend increasingly on TV for their news and information, and US television increasingly doesn’t carry news and information. As a consequence, we’re in a process where politics itself has become politically incorrect. read more

Unbrave New World (12/99)

Danny Schechter June 3, 2005 Danny Schechter

On October l, thousands of New York artists, activists, and politicians rallied outside the Brooklyn Museum against threats by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to defund one of the city’s preeminent cultural institutions. The excuse was one painting on display at a controversial art show, called Sensation, that had played earlier in London. The mayor – who hadn’t even seen the canvas – branded it an outrage to Catholics because of its depiction of a Black Virgin Mary surrounded by sexual organs with an overlay of elephant dung. read more