Biography
Danny Schechter (1942-2015) was a television producer and independent filmmaker who also wrote and spoke about media issues. He is the author of Falun Gong's Challenge to China, The More You Watch, The Less You Know, and News Dissector: Passions, Pieces and Polemics. From 1999 to 2010, Shecter was the executive editor and "blogger-in-chief" at the now defunct MediaChannel.org, a popular online media issues network. Schechter was also the co-founder and executive producer of Globalvision, a New York-based television and film production company, where he produced 156 editions of the award-winning series South Africa Now, and co-produced Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television with Charlayne Hunter-Gault. His human rights production, Globalization and Human Rights was co-produced with Rory O'Connor and shown nationally on PBS. Schechter received his Master's degree from the London School of Economics and an honorary doctorate from Fitchburg College. He was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard, where he also taught in 1969. After college, he was a full time civil rights worker and then communications director of the Northern Student Movement, worked as a community organizer in a Saul Alinsky-style War on Poverty program, and, moving from the streets to the suites, served as an assistant to the Mayor of Detroit in 1966 on a Ford Foundation grant. Schechter was a producer for CNN and a producer for ABC's 20/20, where during his eight years he won two National News Emmys. Schechter was an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. His writing has appeared in leading newspapers and magazines including the The Nation, Newsday, Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, Media Studies Journal, Detroit Free Press, Village Voice, Tikkun, Z Magazine, and many others.