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"The book is a blow-by-blow account of the steady 'dumbing down' of programs and news over the years and few of Schechter's former employers--or celebrity jounalists--escape unscathed...The book's strength lies in the detail and immediacy of Schechter's experience in the major media, his fight to insert serious and historical content into the public domain and alarm at what its absence means to the future of democracy."
--Ben Bagdikian, Lead Review, SUNDAY EXAMINER & CHRONICLE, San Francisco

"It's a personal memoir of 30 years of fighting the bigwigs in the news business, recounting hilarious and revealing stories about life inside CNN and ABC. It offers a powerful critique of the news business today and strategies for creating a more democratic journalism...Danny Schechter, it seems never sleeps, for which he deserves our thanks."
--Jon Wiener, Lead Review, The LOS ANGELES WEEKLY

"...witty and engrossing...Schechter is particularly persuasive in arguing that more news coverage is not necessarily better news coverage. More than anything, he suggests that the cherished ideal of journalism, objectivity, is too often a shibboleth that many of the best and brightest substitute for thought."
--The New York Times

"Thought provoking...shot through with spiky opinions and flashes of insights. Simply put, Schechter is exasperated. He's convinced that concentration of ownership puts decision-making in too few hands and that the context needed to understand complex events is being increasingly stripped away by sensational infotainment disguised as public affairs...The result is the 'OJ-ization of TV.'"
-- David Armstrong, San Francisco Examiner Media Critic, Sunday Examiner, San Francsico

"The More You Watch, The Less You Know makes clear that television's world view is severely cramped by over-riding corporate greed, journalistic self-censorship and a series of simple-minded beliefs such as 'presenting both sides' - as though there were two starkly opposing sides to every issue and a genuinely 'objective' middle. (What, for example, is the 'other side' or the objective view of torture?)... His book is rich in historic anecdote, snappy phrase-making and blood-chilling facts: He reminds us, for example, that only about 10 huge conglomerates now dominate all U.S. media and, as one CNN reporter told him, 'If it doesn't meet commercial criteria, it doesn't get aired.'"
--Michelle Landsberg, THE TORONTO STAR.

Schechter's outsider sensibilities and his insider experiences combine to give his experiences and insights special force...what's striking about 'The More You Watch, The Less You Know' is that it ends not with despair but with buoyancy...A reforner to the end, Schechter is full of ideas for change."
-- Carl Sessions Stepp, AMERICAN JOURNALISM REVIEW, Maryland

"His book about the industry is also the story of his life, and like his pursuit of the truth, bars no holds. No one is better prepared to pull the wool from our eyes, no insider safely cocooned in a corporate job, would get us to wake up and see what we are doing to ourselves by forgetting what we are supposed to know, what we are supposed to be seeing. Danny eloquently protests the dumbing down of America in the race for ratings. As he says, he became a journalist because he thought reporters were the watchdogs of the government. Today, he says -- and proves-- that they are lapdogs."
--Jeanette Friedman, LIFESTYLES Magazine, New Jersey

If you really want to know what's wrong with with television news...The More You Watch, The Less You Know is the perfect textbook conpanion....Schechter's book is a mixture of memoir and thoroughly- researched industry expose and he's been at the right place at the right time....Schechter's book is a suprising reminder of how good television can, or could actually be."
--C.J. Janovy, PITCH WEEKLY, Kansas City, Mo.

"Schechter's feisty new book is not an attempt to compensate for daily conformity. Instead, it's an extension of gutsy endeavours that have typified his work as a media insider and outsider."
--SYNDICATED COLUMNIST NORMAN SOLOMON, in Working Assets

The book weaves between meaty stretches of autobiography and a more detached big-picture scenario in which he intelligently enumerates how business interests rule the whole process of reporting news."
-- THE UTNE READER, Minneapololis

"The More You Watch, The Less You Know" is a great job, and I thought the South African section especially good. I hope the book is widely known and read."
--DENNIS BRUTAS, South African poet and ex-political prisoner

A sulphuric whiff of Chomskyite conspiracy theory blasts from these pages but ABC reporter and documentary film maker Schechter is clearly on the side of the angels. He mixes analysis with anecdotes from his illustious career in the news media.....
-- THE GUARDIAN, LONDON

"The feedback has been unanimous: everyone got a lot out of and enjoyed the (Columbia Journalism Reviw) 'State of the Press Forum,' My deep thanks for adding so substantivly and with such great wit to the discussion... A great deal of the credit for the sucess of "Confronting the Crisis" goes to you, and I am indeed grateful."
--JOAN KONNER, Publisher Columbia Journalism Review and former Dean, The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

"The book is a rare inside report by one of the players who helped shape the history of American television....Selcom have the inner workings of commercial television with its immense Washington lobby and its collusion with regulatory agencies been so ruthlessly exposed> Schechter's keenly etched portrait of Turner and Murdoch and his analysis of their phony "war" would alone make the book worth reading. "
--WAR & PEACE DIGEST, New York

"Skip television for a few days and read Danny Schechter's brilliant, funny, insightful and outrageously intelligent insider's story of his life in the medium. This delicious book will wake you up from the hypnotic spell the media controllers, with a combination of narrow vision and electronic manipulation, have cast on the nation. A collection of stories that a wroiter of good fiction would envy, the book is a news-analysis-entertainment better than anything on the tube. Catch some of Danny Schechter's fire, imagination and chutzpah and rediscover how a good read can be infinitely more enjoyable than the evening news."
--Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and The Soul of Sex

"The book is both a dissection of the failures of the modern news media and an instructive memoir of a life in the field...despite his scathing critique of current trends, he still sees the potential of the media to improve our world. "
--THE BOSTON GLOBE

"An intelligent and saddening yet humorous depiction of the inner workings of giant media groups and behind the scenes forces that often mold public reaction to world events....particularly thought provoking. "
--THE LIBRARY JOURNAL

"Danny Schechter traces the trend of 'saturation covereage' to the Gulf War in his new book, The More You Watch, The Less You Know."
--MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBINE

"Informative and sometimes hilarious...This is a sophisticated, irreverent look at television that will make readers wince--and cry."
--PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY

"Hearing what you had to say was most informative and entertaining and I'm sure many of our listeners will be heading to the store to find your book,"
--Peter Anthony Holder, Host, CJAD RADIO, Montreal

"Danny Schechter, a kind of journalist without borders, has shaken up public broadcasting, among many other media institutions, in the course of his career as a self-styled 'news dissector' and human rights advocate....This is a cautionary tale as much for those who believe in grand conspiracies as for those who refuse to belive that owners mess with the news. It's a terrific testament to the limits of commercial media."
--THE NATION

"Schechter knows whereof he writes...written with a sparkling sesne of wit, this book is a fabulous read no matter what your opinion about television news."
--Bob Powers, POWER BOOKS, GTO Lit crit (Internet)

"Schechter combines scholarly chops--a Nieman Fellow at harvard, London School of Economics grad--with street smarts--he was a Saul Alinsky style organizer for a war on poverty program with an instinct to stir things up. He has created a book that is as entertaining as it is informative."
--Sylvia Ewing-Hoover, Neighborhood Works Magazine, Chicago

"Like Tolkien's dragon-slaying Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, Schechter has found the soft underbelly of the wealth encrusted media monopoly and he tells us where to aim our arrows so that we may bring down the beast...For an insider's look at the modern media beast, The More You Watch is hard to beat."
--Chris Garlock, The Texas Observer

"Schechter does an exceptional job in the end of unmasking the media puppeteers. He provides a clear explanation of the media merger mania...you have to admire the guy. In the face of media power and greed, the needling accomplished by the few Danny Schechters stil aloft may be all that's keeping us zombielike viewers connected to anything that remotely resembles reality."
--Mark Sauer, San Diego Union Tribune

"The More You Watch, The Less You Know is loaded with fascinating and globally importtant news stories that were withheld from public consumption for any number of shameful reasons....Schechter's information is sugar for any greedy news junkie."
--Amy Weivoda, City Pages (Minneapolis)

"Schechter's travails as a 'media mole' at various networks punctuate the back-alley shenanigans of the globe's communications tycoons who are profiled in hilarious detail.....A valuable insider's history of 20th Century Journalism, this book is also a resource for monitoring the globe's media..."
--HIGH TIMES

"Schechter bites the hand that feeds....He's not out to savage television, but he makes no apologies if he offends some people."
--CNN

"In his new book, Schechter explains why the media is in such a mess, how it got that way, and what can be done to remedy its problems."
-- Susan Ellis, THE MEMPHIS FLYER, Tenn.

"He does America a service by warning of the problems inherent in a society in which journalism has become synonymous with entertainment and media mergers mean news that is one sided and sanitized. Not one to simply whine, Schechter closes the book with suggestions about what journalists and the American public can do to change the status quo."
-- Kirkus Reviews

"In the era of the incredibly shrinking soundbite...producer Danny Schechter stands apart."
-- Associated Press.

"Schechter has a keen sense of what is happening in network news."
-- USA Today.


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© 1997, Danny Schechter