Foreword by Jackson Browne and Robert W. McChesney
A candid insider's tale of how the media really works and why it doesn't work the way it should, The More You Watch, The Less You Know has emerged as a key catalyst in the debate on media reform. Since its original release, after more than a hundred television and radio author interviews and countless print reviews and features, The More You Watch, The Less You Know has achieved the near impossible: it has brought the crisis in television news out into the open, gotten it discussed on the very television news programs it critiques, and pretty much everywhere else as well, on the airwaves and off.
The More You Watch, The Less You Know recounts Schechter's media adventures, from when he was "Danny Schechter the News Dissector" on Boston's WBCN radio, to his stints as a producer at ABC's 20/20 and CNN, to his personal odyssey chronicling the anti-Apartheid revolution in South Africa, to his development of innovative programming like South Africa Now and Rights & Wrongs as an independent producer. In this age of telecommunications bills and media mergers, The More You Watch, The Less You Know is an insider’s passionate plea for freedom of the (electronic) press.
Celebrating 40 Years of Project Censored
Did you know that the U.S. military is deployed in 70% of the world's nations? Or that leaked State Deptartment cables show that the U.S. planned to instigate civil strife in Syria as early in 2006? What about the chronic problem of medical neglect in private, for-profit, U.S. immigrant-only jails?
No? Neither did the rest of the world. That's because these and countless other news items are suppressed or ignored by our nation's "free press" every day. For the past forty years, Project Censored has been unearthing the buried stories that corporate media deem unfit to print. They also just hosted a jam-packed Media Freedom Summit and co-founded the Global Critical Media Literacy Project in partnership with the Action Coalition for Media Education and the graduate program in Media Literacy and Digital Culture at Sacred Heart University.
To celebrate, we're showcasing Censored 2017 at a 25% off online discount and offering 50% off Censored backlist titles (from Censored 1996 to Censored 2006), along with select Seven Stoires books on media literacy, including titles by Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky.
Check out our discounted Project Censored and media literacy collection!
Formerly a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard, DANNY SCHECHTER made waves in the mainstream and alternative media for more than 30 years. Called the "alternative Walter Cronkite," he witnessed and participated in the history-making events of our age: from the founding of the Yippies in 1967; to Nelson Mandela's triumphant presidential election in 1994, for which Schechter was designated the exclusive filmmaker; to the Media and Democracy Congress of 1996, which he helped organize; to his most recent television production, Rights & Wrongs, which aired weekly on over 150 PBS and cable outlets nationwide. His many TV specials and films include Beyond Life: Timothy Leary Lives (1997), Countdown to Freedom: Ten Days that Changed South Africa (1994), narrated by James Earl Jones and Alfre Woodard, Sarajevo Ground Zero (1993), Mandela in America (1990), and The Making of Sun City (1990). For eight years a producer at ABC's 20/20, where he won two National News Emmys, Schechter reported from 45 countries and lectured at many schools and universities. He was co-founder and executive producer at Globalvision, a New York-based television and film company where he produced the award-winning series South Africa Now and co-produced Right & Wrongs: Human Rights Television with Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Schechter passed away in 2015.
A longtime media analyst and critic of capitalism, Robert McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2002, he co-founded the Free Press, a media reform organization, and acted as its president until 2008. McChesney lives in Illinois.
