Danny Schechter - background

Brian Salter
questionsquestions.net, 23 Mar 04

Danny Schechter is currently working with Kyle Hence of 9/11 Citizen's Watch to fund and produce a film about 9/11. According to Hence, the film project is currently "in limbo" pending efforts to obtain new funding. In addition to serving as the executive editor of Mediachannel, Schechter is currently an employee of CNBC, as a senior producer for the Tina Brown show. The following is information on Schechter's career and past funding sources / connections.

http://www.globalvision.org/who/who.html

Founded in 1987 by network veterans Rory O'Connor and Danny Schechter , Globalvision is an independent media production company specializing in information, entertainment and educational programming for local and international markets. In addition, Globalvision has recently expanded to the internet through the launch of a subsidiary company, Globalvision New Media.

For more than a decade, Globalvision has produced award-winning news magazine shows, nationally televised specials, feature documentaries distributed internationally, public service campaigns, video news releases, special interest videos, event videos and corporate communications. The company also offers related services including media strategy consulting for such clients as Time Magazine, The Body Shop, and others. In addition, Globalvision New Media has recently launched The MediaChannel , an internet supersite providing original content and links to over 700 affiliated sites.
...

Globalvision's diverse clientele includes NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, The United Nations, The World Bank, Time Magazine, Reebok, Polygram, The Body Shop, Sierra Club, Universal Pictures, Amnesty International, Sony, Marie Claire Magazine, Turner Broadcasting, MTV, Nippon Television, and many others.

http://www.mediachannel.org/about/staff/

DANNY SCHECHTER , EXECUTIVE EDITOR

MediaChannel founder and executive editor Danny Schechter is also a founder and Vice President/Executive Producer of Globalvision, Inc., an award-winning media company formed in l987. Mr. Schechter has been a broadcast and print journalist and is an internationally recognized speaker and writer on media issues. Mr. Schechter was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University and his work has been honored with, among other recognitions, Emmy awards, the IRIS award, the George Polk Award, the Major Armstrong Award, and honors from the National Association of Black Journalists. Mr. Schechter was the news director and principal newscaster for WBCN-FM, an on-air reporter for WGBH, and a news program producer and investigative reporter at CNN and ABC. Mr. Schechter's print journalism has included serving as the London editor for Ramparts magazine; his articles have appeared in Newsday ,Boston Globe ,Columbia Journalism Review ,Detroit Free Press ,Village Voice ,Media Studies Journal, and Z Magazine , among others. Mr. Schechter is the author of "The More You Watch, The Less You Know" (Seven Stories Press) and "News Dissector: Passions, Pieces, and Polemics" (Electron Press).

http://www.questionsquestions.net/feldman/soros.html

5. In 1999, George Soros's Open Society Institute gave a $126,000 grant to the International Center for Global Communications Foundation "toward launch of Media Channel, first global media and democracy supersite on the Internet."

Some critical discussion of George Soros' "philanthropy" and his political background:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/TAL307A.html http://www.canadiandimension.mb.ca/extra/d1207hc.htm

Schechter interviews Soros in 1997
http://www.globalvision.org/program/globalization/soros.html

Comment: it is important for 9/11 activists to remember that Soros is currently taking a very active and high-profile role in funding the Democrats against President Bush. The fact that Schechter has received such crucial past support from Soros' Open Society Institute could make the 9/11 Truth Movement vulnerable to charges of being tools of partisan politics if he comes to be seen as a prominent representative (the same obviously applies to other Soros funding recipients as well).

MediaChannel is an affiliate of OneWorld. here is info on OneWorld's financial backers:

http://www.oneworld.net/article/view/32225/

OneWorld is grateful for the generous support we currently receive for our different programmes from the following organisations:

The Ford Foundation , United States The Guerrand-HermËs Foundation for Peace , United Kingdom The Glaser Progress Foundation , United States Hivos , the Humanist Institute for Cooperation with Developing Countries, Netherlands Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs , Directorate General for International Co-operation (DGIS), Netherlands Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) , Switzerland The Parthenon Trust, United Kingdom Rockefeller Brothers Fund , United States Department for International Development , United Kingdom

Globalvision has also partnered with the Mellon Foundation:

http://www.globalvision.org/educate/educate.html

http://www.globalvision.org/who/whoa.html

A Cornell University graduate, [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.

Note that in the mid-60s, the Ford Foundation was run by McGeorge Bundy, formerly a White House advisor who was identified by Harvard economist J. K. Galbraith as having been secretly elected the informal "head of the [US] Establishment" in 1965. Thus, at that time the Ford Foundation had taken the lead as the US policy elite's chief instrument of social and cultural influence. Some researchers describe Bundy's position at the Ford Foundation as being more powerful and influential than his previous role as head of the National Security Council. "From the streets to the suites" is actually quite a good description of how foundations can co-opt or divert various forms of political dissidence by directing activists into institutional roles. The Ford Foundation still plays a central role in the foundation world, and Schechter appears to have maintained a relationship to the present.

For general information on the influence of foundations on politics and activism please see,

http://www.questionsquestions.net/topics/left_gatekeepers.html

and:

http://www.leftgatekeepers.com

Final note: As a test, I ran google searches on Schechter's mediachannel.org site with the following keywords which one would expect to pull up any recent coverage of 9/11 Truth: "Ruppert", "Chossudovsky", "Hopsicker", "Mariani", "23 questions", "Kean Commission". All searches returned zero results! Although I was able to find a handful of remarks about the Kean Commission and the work of Citizen's Watch and the Family Steering Committee on Schechter's "news dissector" blog, his work as executive editor of Mediachannel does not appear to show any track record whatsoever on 9/11 Truth. This is cause enough for concern whether any production in which Schechter has editorial control will be present an adequate and thorough view of the issues and evidence, let alone the fact that Schechter is currently an employee of a major corporate media network.

Perhaps a little about Schechter's approach to 9/11 truthseeking might be revealed in the following quote:

"Conspiracy theories about these events flourish because independently verified information has yet to see the light of day. More importantly no one has been held accountable for any lapses or misjudgments that left our country undefended."

Danny Schechter, with Colleen Kelly, in "Media Silence on 9/11" published by alternet.org just four months ago.