News Dissector Passions, Pieces and Polemics 1960-2000 Danny Schechter Akashic Books 300 pp. Available from Amazon

As Beale stands as the satirical product of artistic caricature, so Danny Schechter's News Dissector is the real-life avatar of the broadcaster's activist message. After spending his formative years at Cornell, Schechter embarked on a forty-year career as a television producer and journalist that brought him in contact with activist luminary Malcolm X, and later resulted in personal run ins with the FBI and CIA. The book is a collection of progressive articles he authored during this period (1960-2000), detailing in insightful fashion his career-long fight for a more pure media.

The reader is introduced to Schechter as a seventeen-year old high school student; the 1960 piece, "The Forum", finds the youthful journalist denouncing liberal pleas for a lowered voting age: "The age of legal maturity in the U.S. is twenty-one. Lowering the age for voting would eventually lead to lowering the age for jury duty, right to make contracts, etc., and might upset the country's social and economic order in an undesirable way." Included for its sense of ironic juxtaposition, the article represents an important trope in a book that is otherwise about political activism -- namely, Schechter's intellectual coming-of-age.

Further articles reveal Schechter's involvement with Globalvision, a New York based television and film production company, and the varied conflicts he encounters from an allegedly biased media establishment. In the 1994 article "Hidden At PBS?", he tells how, after he'd filmed a documentary on the "hidden hand" (an unrecognized force behind massacres in South Africa), outside powers managed to suppress the work:

"The next day the Los Angeles Times carried a report that David Horovitz, a leftist turned neo-conservative founder of the Committee on Media Integrity, "claimed credit" for the muzzling of South Africa Now. We later learned that he had been lobbying for KCET to persuade the station to dump a wide range of PBS programming that violated his notion of political correctness."

Even as the focus of the articles included relates Schechter's inside experiences to an outside world, some of the most meticulous works are his think pieces -- longer polemics in which Schechter scrutinizes some aspect of the journalistic establishment. With "The Conspiracies of Silence: The Media and the Kennedy Assassination", he investigates the various forces taking hold, including a few pointed attacks on CBS newsman Dan Rather, in a media establishment that has hitherto turned a blind eye toward the possibility of a government conspiracy:

"This has been compounded by the more recent merger of news biz and show biz, which has led to a decline of investigative reporting...part of media reluctance is (also) based on the impression held by many skeptical and critical journalists that the conspiracy crowd is not credible because it accepts the views of kooks for whom one plus one equals five."

While it would be impossible to question Schechter's political zeal, one can't help but wonder if at times blind romanticism clogs the message. The Danny Schector of thirty years later revisits a number of pieces and annotates them with questionable recollections and stilted personal characterizations. At one time, he writes, "I was an outsider who became an insider only to turn myself into an outsider again" and later discover "...I felt like Herbert Philbric...who lived three lives -- one as a member of the communist part, one as a Soviet Spy, and the third as a counterspy for the FBI." Perhaps the largest absurdity is related with unconscious irony in "Draft Board", an article detailing how Schechter abused his connections with the mayor to avoid the Vietnam draft:

"Edelstein agreed to come, not doubt as favor for the mayor of Detroit... The Board heard his short testimonial and then asked me some perfunctory questions. Then, on the spot, my 2-S was granted. I shouted. Mr. Edelstein smiled knowingly."

However, in the end it's not Danny Schechter's misplaced efforts that we keep in mind, but his relentless pursuit of a true and just news media. The concluding articles even recognize an issue Dowd failed to broach -- to wit, what are we going to do about it? With one of the book's concluding articles, "How to Change the Media", the reader is even introduced to a five-step program for better journalism. Apparently Howard Beale wasn't the only one "mad as hell".

-- John Wolfe