WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception
March 9, 2013
Deception. Dissection. A New Perception.
By Sara Faith Alterman via New England Film
It seems practical, even reasonable, to rely on news organizations to broadcast accurately. Such informational institutions exist to dig up the facts, right? Maybe not. In the aftermath of President Bush’s crusade to eliminate the seemingly omnipotent threat of ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ it has become pretty obvious that what initially appeared to be a deed of heroism and liberation was actually a vicious act of messy retribution. The burning question is, how much did the embedded American media uncover while reporting from the Middle East? Were American audiences actually getting the facts as they unfolded, or were we shielded from the truth?
Danny Schechter seems to be just the man to investigate suspicions about the media; he himself spent years entrenched in media production, and his experience is deeply rooted in the Boston area. A one-time Neiman Fellow at Harvard, Schechter has worked for Channel 2, Channel 5, Channel 56, and, most memorably, spent 12 years as the news director/”news dissector” at WBCN. He is currently the Executive Editor of MediaChannel.org.
Schechter’s new documentary “WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception” asserts that Americans were cheated out of thorough coverage during the war on Iraq. Investigating the theory that audiences are at the mercy of a media with ulterior motives, the film explores the paradigm of fact versus ‘good television,’ and provides substantiation to those who have suspected all along that American audiences are hardly getting “the truth and nothing but.”
Read interview . Below YouTube (1:38:08)
