We speak with two close colleagues and friends of the pioneering author, filmmaker and media reform activist Danny Schechter, who died last week of pancreatic cancer at the age of 72, and play excerpts from different points in his career. In one interview, Schechter explains how he got his start as “The News Dissector” on Boston’s WBCN radio in the 1970 and garnered fans such as Noam Chomsky. Schechter went on to work as a television producer at ABC’s 20/20, where he won two Emmy Awards, and at the newly launched CNN. He wrote 12 books, including “The More You Watch, the Less You Know.” He was also a leading activist and journalist against apartheid in South Africa, who left the corporate journalist world to make six documentaries about Nelson Mandela and produce the groundbreaking television series “South Africa Now,” which aired on 150 public television stations in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle. We broadcast exclusive excerpts from the show, which has been newly digitized by Yale University, and speak with South African filmmaker Anant Singh, who worked with Schechter on the feature film “Mandela: Long Walk Home”; and Rory O’Connor, who co-founded Globalvision with Schechter and worked with him for decades.
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