"I've told many stories. This is my own."

A WORK IN PROGRESS

Putting the 'ME' Back in 'MEdia'

A Danny Schechter Self-Dissection

What is independent media, and what distinguishes it from the mainstream? Danny Schechter knows--having worked "on the inside" at ABC, CNN and CNBC and then building a high profile career on the "outside" as a blogger, indy-filmmaker, author and TV producer. Danny Schechter has been producing media since the 1960's, often fusing his work with concerns about human rights, global justice, and media integrity.

Now, the journalist known as "the News Dissector" is dissecting his own career in a personal film chronicling four decades of engagement with the issues of our times. Titled "A WORK IN PROGRESS: Putting the ME back in Media," it is produced and edited by Marie Sullivan. In the hour long film Schechter tells his own story with excerpts from a prolific body of work, interviews, and archival rarities from his early immersion in the civil rights movement where he interacted with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to later reporting on Nelson Mandela's trek from prison to the Presidency of South Africa.

The project was undertaken to encourage young people to infuse their media careers with meaning and social values. "I believe in the power of role models," Schechter says, "because I certainly credit my own inspirations. Hopefully my experiences and battles as a 'participatory journalist' will speak to others."

"A WORK IN PROGESS: Putting the ME back in Media" offers the kind of hard-hitting critique of modern journalism that Schechter is known for as editor of Mediachannel.org and the author of eight books from "The More You Watch The Less You Know" in 1997 to "When News Lies: Media Complicity and the Iraq War" in 2006. But it goes beyond the critiques to show what committed journalists can do by way of socially engaged TV series like South Africa Now and documentary features including WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception) on the media coverage of the Iraq War (2004) and "IN DEBT WE TRUST" about the credit crunch in America (2006).

The film features the many celebrities Schechter has worked for and the causes he's championed. It draws on his work in print, radio, local news, TV and filmmaking.

A WORK IN PROGRESS was work-shopped with media students at the film program at Yale University and media classes at the New College in San Francisco, NYU and The Rochester Institute of Technology to get input from a generation for whom the 1960's and 70's s are distant history.

It premieres at the National Media Reform Conference in Memphis on January 13th, and will be shown next at a "master class" for film students at the University of Utah on January 19th at the first weekend of this year's Sundance Film Festival.

A WORK IN PROGRESS is produced by Globalvision to mark the indy-media company's™s twentieth anniverry.

For more information, contact dissector@mediachannel.org.

You can check out the The News Dissector Blog, or perhaps you'd be interested in Danny's home page, Dissectorville?