Journalist, filmmaker, and activist, Danny Schechter, “The News Dissector,” died on March 19, 2015 at 72 years old.

Schechter was a true pioneer of progressive independent journalism. He had a long career with ABC and CNN before unplugging from the mainstream to produce judicious films and write hard hitting books. He was a free press champion and fierce anti-apartheid activist who will be missed dearly by the millions of lives he touched.

Unplug the Signal Campaign’s Roeland Eider chose to release this never-before-published 2011 interview with Schechter for Media Roots.

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MR: There is a sentiment among Americans, and older generations in particular, that the only news that can be trusted comes from major media sources on television and in print. As an independent journalist, how do you fight this battle for legitimacy?

Danny Schechter: I began fighting it by infiltrating it, becoming a producer at CNN, ABC and CNBC. I wanted to learn the techniques and understand the culture inside big media. I tried to bring the strengths of the system into my work as an impendent producer. There is a reason that folks tend to watch TV. It has to do with its mastery of production techniques, story telling and ways to appeal to the audience coupled with extensive marketing and promotion. As other entertainment choices become more expensive–live sports, theater, movies, TV appears a more affordable option. I know you are mostly interested in news and the fact is that there are now so many more choices, on line and off. I have been involved on line since l986, producing the Media channel since l999 as part of an effort of offering other narratives and critical ideas. I am also an author and independent documentary producer so use those formats too often within the context of journalism.

MR: What are your thoughts on today’s television journalists and news anchors? Can you comment on the trend of these individuals filling news segments with their personal opinions rather than objectively reporting significant news?

Danny Schechter: The notion of total objectivity has been discredited but remains the fiction that an industry uses to suggest its neutrality even when it makes clear choices in what stories to report and which to ignore, omission being as important as commission here. News anchors become the personalities they use to sell their wares–it is more about selling than telling—but other networks which are popular like Al Jazeera are not as wedded to the celebrity anchor, preferring to let what is news, drive the discourse.

MR: Many people, if they have not heard about it on the nightly news, don’t care to learn other information. Do you find it hard to communicate information that is never addressed on television?

Danny Schechter: First, nightly newscast has a smaller and smaller audience and skews older–just look at all the ads for certain pharmaceutical products. But that does not mean people are necessarily being exposed to more in-depth treatments. With Tweets and face book, we are as much as a headline hit parade country as we always was.

Yes, It is more difficult to be ahead of the news pack because what you do often lack for reinforcement and validation from other sources and outlets. We live in a media environment. Can it be done–yes–but with great difficulty.

MR: Should we be concerned that on many occasions’ public relations firms are providing the nightly news instead of journalists?

Danny Schechter: 70% of media school grads go into PR because those firms have jobs and pay better than news outlets. Of course, we should be concerned when sources are not transparent and spin substitute for journalism. Its not just the pr firms—because governments and corporations –and advocacy groups–play a big role.

MR: What do you feel has been the most significant change within the field of journalism over the past 10 years?

Danny Schechter: Rise of digital journalism, citizen journalism, and even public information advocates like WikiLeaks.

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Interview conducted by Roeland Eider 

Articles aplenty have appeared to mark the recent 50th anniversary of the first battle between US soldiers and the army of what was known in this country as North Vietnam. Come April, we can expect far more commentary on the 40th anniversary of the end of the fighting in what is still referred to as the “Fall of Saigon.”

This is especially significant considering the Pentagon recently posted a lengthy history of the Vietnam War (the Vietnamese, whose struggle for independence was waged against the Chinese, the French and the Japanese, in addition to the US, refer to this same period as the American War). Many sifting through its website might be confused as to why the stories differ dramatically from what one would hear from a war veteran or activist.

Pinpointing where US aggression in Vietnam began depends on how one determines when war starts. It’s silly to claim it began in February of 1965, as tens of thousands of Vietnamese were already dead at US hands by that point. Better to trace the origins to 1945, when the United States refused to recognize the new government established by Vietnamese independence forces.

See, Japan invaded Vietnam years earlier and French colonialists ceded the country to the Japanese. When French colonialists finished sipping cognac in Paris and decided to re-invade Vietnam, the US backed them to the hilt with weapons, financing and diplomatic cover. Unsurprisingly, the Vietnamese people resisted – just as they had resisted other occupiers for centuries.

As the French failed its attempt at re-conquest, the US bore more of the war’s burden until, in 1954, the Vietnamese were again on a path to independence. Yet the US undermined the elections Washington knew Ho Chi Minh would win in a landslide. As in dozens of cases over the past 100 years, the US opposed democracy in favor of aggression. Elections are praised when the right people win; machine guns raised if the wrong people win.

The US flew Ngo Dinh Diem in from New Jersey and installed him as dictator. Eventually, Kennedy had him whacked a mere three weeks before he himself was assassinated. This was not, however, before Kennedy began the saturation bombing of South Vietnam with napalm, while also calling for ground troops and organized strategic hamlets.

Lyndon Johnson’s fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 was another turning point. Within six months, the Peace Candidate who had startled the world with a campaign ad attacking Barry Goldwater as a warmonger extended the invasion and bombing campaign in Vietnam. So it remained until the Super Rich grew antsy about the financial costs of the war, the US’s growing international embarrassment, unprecedented domestic upheaval, an army that increasingly wouldn’t fight, and the stark realization that there was no way the Vietnamese could lose militarily. I recall reading years ago something a Vietnamese elder who had probably seen as much death and destruction as anyone who ever lived said (I’m paraphrasing): We can settle this now or we can settle it a thousand years from now. It’s up to the Americans.                 

It’s impossible to calculate the Vietnamese death toll. Whatever Vietnam has said has been dismissed by the powerful, as anti-American propaganda and US elites have never bothered to summarize. Their attitude was captured perfectly by a general speaking of a more recent conflagration: “We don’t do body counts.” Not, anyway, when the dead bodies are victims of US violence.  

Three million Vietnamese deaths is a commonly cited figure but undoubtedly far too low. Also completely ignored is the Vietnamese experience of Agent Orange and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, for example. Take the terrible suffering of US soldiers and multiply their numbers ten thousand fold or more and we get a sense of the damage to the Vietnamese. Additionally, Vietnam and the rest of Indochina (it’s often conveniently forgotten that the US also waged war against Laos and Cambodia) are full of unexploded ordinances that regularly cause death and injuries, to this day. There’s also the starvation deaths of hundreds of thousands throughout Indochina immediately after the war. A countryside ravaged by bombing, combined with the curtailment of airlifts, doomed those hundreds of thousands once the US imposed an ironclad embargo. That’s an unpleasant truth, though; so much easier to blame everything on the Vietnamese Communists and the despotic Khmer Rouge.

Discussions of Vietnam are hardly academic exercises; the US is on a global rampage and falsifying history has paved the way to the US-caused deaths of three million Iraqis since the first invasion in 1991, to cite just one of many recent examples. We remain in the grips of people who worship wealth and are in love with war, so any truth and reckoning about Vietnam and the destruction imperialism wreaks on the world will have to come from us.

Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning author | [email protected]

Photo by flickr user Manhhai

For twenty years, Western elites have spun a tale of how Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame heroically ended the 1994 genocide in that country.

That narrative has persisted despite the fact that a great deal of evidence shows that Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) did much of the killing and has committed extraordinary levels of violence in neighboring Congo since invading that country not long after seizing power.

The recent BBC telecast of Rwanda: The Untold Story indicates that the truth about Kagame may finally be penetrating the mainstream. Rwanda: The Untold Story presents much information that contradicts the official narrative, specifically that the dramatic escalation in violence began not in April 1994 but in October 1990 when the RPF invaded from its outposts in Uganda; that RPF forces killed tens of thousands of people in the 42-month period from the invasion to April 1994; and that the RPF is responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand more Rwandans during the three month period of bloodshed in 1994.  

In contrast, the spinners of the Kagame the Hero tale have put the entire responsibility on the Hutu-controlled government and armed Hutu mobs. The RPF’s 1990 invasion, meanwhile, has been completely written out of history in the official narrative, as has RPF responsibility for the shooting down of a plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana. It was immediately after the murder of Habyarimana that what has been known since as the Rwandan Genocide began.

Another part of the official narrative that was exposed long ago by Edward Herman, Robin Philpot and others is that the US didn’t do enough to stop the killing. In fact, Kagame was an imperial operative as early as the 1980’s who trained at Fort Leavenworth and the US was closely allied with the RPF even before the 1990 invasion. Throughout the spring of 1994, the Clinton administration was proactive in blocking the UN from taking measures that might have prevented much of the killing. Former United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Gali, for one, has put the entire blame for what happened in Rwanda in the 1990’s on the United States.

In addition, while the Rwandan government and France, its primary ally, supported international action to stop the killing, Kagame was so determined to take complete control of the country that he eschewed a ceasefire and negotiations. The inescapable conclusion is that the mounting deaths on both sides were acceptable to Kagame and, by extension, the US, so long as the end result was complete victory and the ascension of the RPF to power.

From the outset, both Hutu and Tutsi survivors, UN officials and numerous investigators have presented an entirely different version of events. Those stories, which have been fortified by population studies and other means, reveal that both sides are each responsible for hundreds of thousands of killings. These dissident voices have been ignored and, in the case of several studies by human rights groups and the UN, suppressed – at least until the airing of Rwanda: The Untold Story.

Perpetrators and supporters of empire who have never seen a US war crime they didn’t like have attacked critics of the official narrative and obfuscated who really benefits from the ongoing warfare. It’s a neat trick practiced regularly: falsely accuse dissidents of denying atrocities and deny imperial atrocities, all the while obscuring the billions in US business profits made possible by Kagame’s invasions of the Congo.

Western plunder of the region dates to the murderous rule of Belgian King Leopold II. No sooner did the Congolese independence movement succeed in 1960 than Congolese reactionaries and their Belgian and CIA helpers overthrew and eventually murdered Patrice Lumumba, the nation’s first elected Prime Minister. Eventually installed in Lumumba’s place was US puppet Mobutu Sese Soko, who for 30 years served US business interests as zealously as Kagame has. And much as a succession of US administrations hailed Mobutu as a great man, Clintons, Madeline Albright, George Bush II, Samantha Power and Susan Rice hail Kagame as “the man who ended the Rwandan Genocide.” Never mind the millions of Congolese who have been killed or died from starvation, disease and other causes traced directly to Kagame’s invasions.

The unraveling of the official Rwanda story has global implications, as the US has invoked “preventing another Rwanda” to justify invasions of the former Yugoslavia, Libya and large swaths of the Middle East. With a population increasingly alarmed by endless wars of aggression, the fact that the foundation for those acts is one big lie brings us closer to the day when we can end forever imperial ambitions and war.

Andy Piascik of Bridgeport writes for Z Magazine/Znet

Photo by flickr user DFID

In the wake of the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, many mainstream media outlets featured guests who shifted the focus from police brutality to “black-on-black” violence.

FBI statistics show that intra-racial homicide is high for both blacks (90%) and whites (83%), so it’s puzzling when people bring up black-on-black homicide as if it’s a pathology endemic to black people. Nevermind that when a white suspect opens fire at a movie theater, elementary school or on a Congress woman, white-on-white homicide is hardly ever mentioned nor discussed.

There’s long history in the United States of racist law enforcement and mistreatment of African Americans. But this red-herring tells black people they should concern themselves with intra-racial violence as opposed to police violence, patently dismissing legitimate grievances African Americans have in regards to the over-policing of their communities.

Black communities are very concerned about high rates of gun violence and homicides, as well as the socioeconomic conditions that put black youth at risk for experiencing violent trauma. In many communities across the country, there are several neighborhood organizations working to reduce gang and gun violence. Cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, Oakland and Chicago have hospital-based or hospital-affiliated violence intervention programs that help reduce recidivism among those who have experienced violent trauma using biopsychosocial framework to mitigate associated risk.

Those who wish to deflect attention away from unarmed black men being murdered by police and point fingers at community neglect don’t seem to care that these programs and organizations exist. Just because the media doesn’t show protests against black-on-black violence doesn’t mean they are not occurring.

Unaccountable police killings are rampant across the country and color lines, but black men are gunned down by white police officers with impunity at a rate 21 times higher than their white counterparts. People are waking up to this disturbing trend and participating in mass at protests and die-ins nationwide to express their outrage towards police impunity.

While President Obama seems to think requesting hundreds of millions of dollars to outfit officers with body cameras will prevent these violent encounters, the murders of Eric Garner and Oscar Grant were both caught on camera. Daniel Pantaleo was not indicted for the death of Garner while BART police officer Johannes Mehserle spent only 11 months in prison for the murder of Grant.

America’s two-tiered justice system continues to exhibit that life does not matter, especially when it’s African American. It will only take a sustained, collective movement to end violent, racist, and militarized police practices across the country. The black community is working hard to address the serious issue of black-on-black violence. So next time you hear this sensationalist argument, shift the conversation to where it really matters: the system.

Ken Peeples is working in social behavioral and biomedical research in Philadelphia. His background is Political Science and African American Studies. @StatelessMan18

Photo by flickr user Barry Yanowitz