By Danny Schechter, Prometheus Books (October 2003), Free eBook Provided by ColdType.net.

Veteran journalist and media watcher Danny Schechter, a former ABC and CNN producer, monitored and now analyzes the cheerleading for a war in which reporting was sanitized, staged, and suppressed. The author of MEDIA WARS: NEWS AT A TIME OF TERROR, THE MORE YOU WATCH THE LESS YOU KNOW, and NEWS DISSECTOR, brings an insider's knowledge based on thirty years in journalism with an outsider's perspective to critiquing media coverage. Throughout the war he was "self-embedded" at Mediachannel.org, the world's largest online media issues network.

Schechter's insightful, wide-ranging critique of the American media's war coverage targets the way in which a virtual merger between the Pentagon and the media produced a war spectacle that the American public was primed to see, media collusion in the campaign to discredit the UN, "rightwing liberation theology" as war propaganda, the cozy relationship between news anchors and retired officers hired as military analysts, the controversies over Peter Arnett and Geraldo Rivera, the looting of Baghdad, the lack of media focus on civilian casualties, the disparities in coverage between the U.S. and foreign media, and more.

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From Publishers Weekly:

News hound Schechter (Media Wars; The More You Watch the Less You Know; etc.) opines on WMDs ("Weapons of Mass Deception") in this impassioned indictment of the news media's coverage of the recent war in Iraq. Among his beefs are the civilian casualties that were "rarely shown in the western media," the way the coverage "sold the war even as it claimed to be just reporting it," and the media's poor-and in some cases absent-portrayal of the war protests, which he says were "the largest global protests in history." Calling the President "Daddy Bush" and using other colloquial terms, Schechter presents his thoughts in a diary-like form, dating his thoughts as the war progresses and interjecting questions (for himself and for readers) throughout. For skeptics and those unhappy with the way Americans learned of what was happening in Iraq, this is an energetic but deeply discouraging study.

Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author:

Danny Schechter is executive editor of Mediachannel.org; cofounder and executive producer of Globalvision, a New York-based television and film production company; a recipient of the Society of Professional Journalists' 2001 Award for Excellence in Documentary Journalism; a former producer for CNN and for ABC News 20/20, where he won two National News Emmys; and the author of many books on the media.

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