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For more information contact:
Janet Lawson 570-421-3525
Jerilyn DePete 570-421-5263
Pocono Progressives presents Danny Schechter, award-winning investigative journalist, producer, and director at the Pocono Cinema on Saturday, April 2. The event will begin at noon with a showing of his film "WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception."
Mr. Schechter is executive editor of Mediachannel.org, the world’s largest online media-issues network, and a cofounder and executive producer of Globalvision, a New York–based film and TV production company. As a producer for ABC and CNN, he garnered two Emmys and has won many professional journalism awards for his work.
According to Schechter, a Cornell University graduate and former Neiman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard, there are two wars in Iraq: one military, the other fought with cameras, satellites, and armies of journalists. Embedded journalists and new technologies permitted viewers to see a war up close, yet Schechter explores how this round-the-clock media marathon pitted media outlets against each other in ways that distorted the truth and in some ways promoted the war.
In analyzing media coverage of the war in Iraq, Schechter was struck by the similarity between American media coverage and state-run media system, or what he calls “a patriotic correctness and uniformity of viewpoint that was more ‘selling than telling’ about the war. “I felt we had moved into a post-journalism era where packaging and ‘militainment’ prevailed,” Schechter said. “Even as larger numbers of Americans and people around the world dissented, their views were rarely seen and heard.” Schechter made the film in response to what he considers a "media crisis and a crisis for democracy."
Mr. Schechter is the author of Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception: How the Media Failed to Cover the Iraq War (Prometheus Books) and winner of the Society of Professional Journalists Award for Excellence in Documentary Journalism.
Pocono Progressives is a nonpartisan grassroots activist organization that is working to elect a government that will commit itself to diplomatic solutions to conflict, protect and preserve the environment, defend civil liberties, support social-service programs, and respect and respond to the values and concerns of its citizenry and the global community. Click here for the event flyer.