Author Archive | Danny Schechter

The New ‘Argo’ – Evil North Koreans Trash the White House In Latest Hollywood Fear Vehicle

By on April 3, 2013 in News 0

The trend towards movies ripped from the news, or perhaps ripping off the news continues.

Olympus Has Fallen is the latest in the popular  “learn to fear thy enemy even more than you did before” category, as director Antoine Fuqua visualizes a story that can’t be more topical with the White House (Secret Service Code: “Olympus”) occupied by a North Korean terrorist fanatic and his barbaric followers.

The President is held hostage, the building is trashed, and its defenses shredded while our hero, a disgraced former Presidential guard, becomes the savior despite the mounting body count including a massacre of civilians and military responders as well as the near capture of top secret nuclear codes.

Of course, at the last moment, Mr. America fights off the incompetent Pentagon bureaucracy, repels the invaders and singlehandedly saves the President’s son, before rescuing the commander in chief and averting the war to end all wars.… Read the rest

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Nelson Mandela Fights For His Life…Again!

By on March 30, 2013 in News 0

Nelson Mandela 1998 croppedNelson Mandela is fighting for his life again—his third hospitalization in four months as the world looks on with silent prayers. The media attention he is receiving speaks to the respect with which he is held, even though most of the coverage points more to his age than the fact that the respiratory condition he has was contracted under brutal prison conditions and he clearly, even now, is a victim of the apartheid system he battled into submission.

The world media is pumped by another deathwatch. In South Africa, Madiba, as he is known by his clan name, is called a “FBR”—the Freelancers Best Friend—because of all the work the around the clock coverage his condition inspires. At the BBC in London, striking staffers ay they will return to work to cover his death.

When he and his comrades arrived on South Africa’s draconian Robben Island, he was the 466th to be incarcerated in 1964.… Read the rest

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Reliving The South African Struggle In London

By on March 24, 2013 in News 0

London School of Economics Coat of ArmsLondon: Thomas Wolfe wrote “You Can’t Go Home Again” years ago, and its core truth keeps popping up in my life even as I tend to retrace some of my life journeys, in an endless walk down memory lane.

I am back in London, cold and wet as I remember it, to attend an event honoring those of us who went to South Africa on underground missions at my mid 1960’s alma mater, The London School of Economics and Political Science. I was on political side of he College’s split personality back in 1966-68.

This event marked my real “major” in what the Rolling Stones called “street fighting years:“ imagining world revolution.

Our group of solidarity stalwarts is now called “The London Recruits.” There is now a book out from Merlin Press telling our story in the words of many participants, including myself.

Yes, I was an activist in those pre-journalism years, blamed by some in the then Fleet Street press for sparking the LSE’s student “troubles” that soon morphed into an occupation and dramatic student protest.… Read the rest

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The Military Industrial Complex Stimulus Program is Undeterred

By on March 20, 2013 in News 0

Is there a panic on the Potomac?  The Congress has turned into a wailing wall just to hear all the moans about threatened cuts in what is patriotically known as our Defense budget.

Never mind that many of the cuts were ordered from above because the people at the top know how much they have to slash given all the waste, planned obsolescence and other waste they can afford to trim before they cut the bone or some hostile force can bring us to our knees.

The people who experience the reality up close and personal know that the public is being defrauded on almost every level.

Listen to Sgt. 1st Class Robert Zlotow from Fort Riley, Kan. who had the guts to send this letter to Army Times.

“I nearly spit out my dinner when I read your headline “Fighting through austerity” (March 4).

Even with these “evil” and “scary” cuts factored in, the defense budget will still rise every year in the foreseeable future.  According to the Congressional Budget Office, the projected defense budget will still go from $593 billion in fiscal year 2014 to $702 billion in 2023, even if this sequester is allowed to stand.

… Read the rest

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Warning: South Africa Is An Angry And Frustrated Nation And On The Brink

By on March 11, 2013 in News 6

DurbanSign1989Durban, South Africa: These are not the best of times in South Africa. It seems clear that there is fear and loathing everywhere as the press is packed with fresh allegations of corruption, and a restive mood spreads even as the country prepares to host the economic Summit of the BRICS countries it is part of–Brazil, Russia, India, and China which is facing a growth in joblessness and economic/political malaise.

Nelson Mandela’s wife, Graca Machel, the brilliant Mozambican leader who married the man everyone here calls by his clan name Madiba, is speaking out even as her husband Nelson Mandela no longer can because of age and infirmity.

She calls South Africa an “angry nation… on the brink of ‘something very dangerous’. She was speaking at a memorial for a Mozambican cab driver whose killing by the police was caught on a cellphone camera and went viral. The police deny they were brutal, despite the video, which further outrages a country that seems to be increasingly turning on the politicians they see as plundering its resources.… Read the rest

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Malls for the ‘Sheeple’

By on March 4, 2013 in News 7

Into Boksburg and ERMDurban, South Africa: Back in 2002, South Africa hosted a UN environmental Summit on sustainability. It drew a rag tag army of green activists from all over the world, many excited to visit the now free South Africa that they fought for through the apartheid years, and hoping to meet members of the liberation movement led by Nelson Mandela

The closest to Nelson Mandela they got was to gather in front of a giant statue, created by a Swedish artist, in a commercial Square named after the South African icon. When they pictured the new South Africa, they probably saw the townships where tens of thousands of people marched for justice.

Instead, they found themselves in Sandton, a “township” that only capitalists could imagine, an upscale enclave within the city of Johannesburg devoted to corporation, banks and giant malls even more opulent than similar temples of consumption in other countries.… Read the rest

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The Media Loves Manhunts: Can Chris Dorner Survive?

By on February 9, 2013 in News 29

Only in California, home of the late Huey P. Newton and then the Symbionese Liberation Army that went several steps further, do characters emerge that transcend every action movie fantasy and stereotype, characters like an ex-cop who has declared war on the police on, of all places, Facebook in a 6000 word statement that’s being described as “rambling.” (He never claimed he was writer.)

He denounces police practices that he considers racist and abusive, although the sheer drama of the manhunt will make it unlikely that media outlets will seriously delve into the substance of his charges.

Here is the full, uncensored text of his posting.

Christopher Jordan Dorner is being pictured as the “mad man” of the hour, playing himself in the manhunt of the week, accused of three murders that he denies, or appears deny as the author of a statement that’s being labeled a manifesto adding political weight to what began as personal crusade for self-vindication.… Read the rest

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Saving Public Education

By on February 4, 2013 in News 2

The old DeWitt Clinton building, now John Jay College, Photo: Americasroof (CC)

I’d like to use the word “justice” – that I felt compelled to tell the story of the school as a matter of justice. That we are so easy to write books and tell stories about great universities, but when it comes to high schools we don’t think that way. And yet if you ask every person on the street about somebody  who influenced them, he always or she always brings up a high school teacher or a high school coach. High schools have had a tremendous influence on who we are as a people, as a nation. And there should be documentation about the high schools, and I believe that DeWitt Clinton is a great school that has had tremendous influence on American life. – Gerard Pelisson, former high school teacher and co-author of  “The Castle on the Parkway,” a history of DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx N.Y.… Read the rest

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When A President Criticizes The Press: Is Anyone Listening?

By on January 29, 2013 in News 4

There is one subject that most politicians avoid: talking about the media. Most spend most of their time positioning themselves for media attention because most seem to need and rely on media visibility.

The media provides their political oxygen and, hence, explains why they spend so much time spinning their words with hired press secretaries, advisors and consultants.

In many ways, being on the air validates their role if not their existence. . Hence, many are always scrambling to be interviewed for TV news and on Sunday shows. Media visibility is a key tool in the permanent campaigns most pols run for their reelections and to move up the political ladder.

Much of the money they spend so much time raising goes right back into the media for commercials.

As a result, they usually don’t discuss their experiences or opinions perhaps out of fear of antagonizing media outlets by suggesting that they don’t operate responsibly.… Read the rest

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Inauguration Day: Ho Hum

By on January 21, 2013 in News 5

Doug Mills/NYT (Fair Use)

What a difference a term in office makes.

Look at the picture (at right) yesterday of the President becoming president again in an oval office ceremony surrounded only by his family swearing an oath administered by a Chief Justice he should be swearing at.

Today what fans turn up will cheer him on, but the die seems to be cast.

He is really alone, shorn of so many of the hopes and expectations his supporters invested in his candidacies.

Even his advisors are distancing themselves. So much for any sense of a grand crusade or plan for change!  He is a reactor, not an enactor, a conciliator, not a combative fighter.

We know him now, even if we wish we didn’t. Illusions keep disillusion away, but not forever.

Even his advisors are slipping away, leaving him to relay on managers and national securocrats  He may not have sold out–because he was always this way—but he surely bought in.… Read the rest

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