Danny Schechter, known to readers and listeners around the world as the News Dissector, was one of the most persistent critics of corporate media that American journalism produced. Born in 1942 in New York City and dying in March 2015 at the age of 73, Schechter spent more than half a century holding broadcasters, editors, and executives accountable for what they chose to cover, and what they chose to ignore. His career stretched from radical community radio in the 1960s through to digital media in the 2010s, and it never lost its edge.
From WBCN to global media critic
Schechter first made his name at WBCN in Boston, where he became one of the pioneering voices of free-form FM radio in the late 1960s. The nickname "the News Dissector" stuck almost immediately. It captured exactly what he was doing: pulling apart the news cycle, questioning the framing, and asking who benefited from the stories that got told and the ones that did not. His approach had much in common with the tradition of challenging corporate journalism that independent reporters have sustained across generations.
He moved into television, spending years at ABC News and CNN in the 1980s and 1990s, producing documentary work and international coverage that won him multiple Emmy Awards. But Schechter was never comfortable inside large broadcast institutions. He found the commercial pressures corrosive and said so, loudly, in books, essays, and interviews throughout his career. The tension between doing serious journalism and satisfying ratings-driven management defined much of his professional life.
Founding MediaChannel and the independent media turn
In 2000, Schechter co-founded MediaChannel.org, a website dedicated to media criticism and global news analysis. It was an early and serious attempt to create an independent hub for the kind of accountability journalism that mainstream outlets were, in his view, systematically failing to deliver. The site aggregated criticism, published original reporting, and tried to build a community of media-literate readers at a moment when the internet was still being figured out as a journalistic space.
Schechter was also a prolific filmmaker. His documentary "WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception," released in 2004, examined how American news organisations had failed to question the Bush administration's case for the invasion of Iraq. The film was sharp, damning, and drew on his insider knowledge of how television news actually worked. He followed it with "Plunder: The Crime of Our Time" in 2009, which looked at the financial crisis and the media's role in missing, and at times enabling, the collapse.
Books, blogging, and the long argument
Across his career, Schechter wrote more than a dozen books. Titles like "The More You Watch, The Less You Know" and "News Dissector: Passions, Pieces and Polemics" collected his arguments about media ownership, the narrowing of news agendas, and the consequences for democratic life when citizens are misinformed or simply distracted. His blog, also called News Dissector, kept running right up until his illness forced him to stop.
He was a consistent voice on the economics of news. Long before the conversation about media sustainability became urgent, Schechter was writing about what happened when profit motive overtook public interest in newsrooms. His arguments overlapped with, and at times anticipated, the critiques that Bill Moyers brought to public broadcasting: that the commercial pressures on journalism were not just a business problem, but a civic one.
South Africa and international reporting
One of the less-discussed dimensions of Schechter's work was his sustained engagement with South Africa. He covered the anti-apartheid movement extensively and produced documentary work on Nelson Mandela, including a film about Mandela's life that reached audiences across several countries. He saw South Africa as a case study in how international media could both illuminate and distort a political struggle, depending on who controlled the framing.
That global sensibility ran through everything he did. He reported from conflict zones, covered movements for economic justice, and was an early and consistent supporter of what he called "media for democracy": the idea that a functioning press was not just a nice-to-have but a precondition for political life worth having. His work aligned with the kind of investigative and advocacy journalism that outlets like Anya Schiffrin has traced across a century of the craft.
The final years and his legacy
Schechter was diagnosed with brain cancer in late 2014. He died on 19 March 2015 in New York. Tributes came from across the media world, from colleagues who had worked alongside him inside major networks and from independent journalists who had followed his writing from the margins. Both groups said the same thing: that he meant what he wrote, and that he never stopped.
His legacy is harder to quantify than a list of awards or bylines. What Schechter left behind was a way of reading the news. The News Dissector habit, asking who is telling this story, who is not being heard, and what structural forces shaped the editorial choices, is as necessary now as it was in 1969 on a radio station in Boston. In a media environment that has only grown more concentrated and more algorithmically driven since his death, his questions have not become less urgent. They have become more so.
He was, as he would have been the first to say, not always right. Some of his later work veered into territory that drew criticism, and his association with certain outlets raised eyebrows among journalists who admired his earlier career. But his core argument, that the media system shapes political reality and that citizens who do not examine it are at its mercy, has held up.
Danny Schechter, born 1942, died 2015. The News Dissector lives in the questions he kept asking.