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      Danny Schechter Award for Journalism and Activism Goes to Winona LaDuke

      Danny Schechter Award for Journalism and Activism Goes to Winona LaDuke

      The Global Center, a non-profit educational foundation dedicated to developing socially responsible media, is proud to announce Native American leader Winona LaDuke as the recipient of the fifth annual DANNY Award, which honors the life and work of the late Danny "The News Dissector" Schechter.

      Rory O'Connor
      Jun 15, 2020

      "With the country in turmoil over racial injustice, a public health crisis and devastating job losses, it should be no surprise that journalists are caught up in the tumult," Washington Post media writer Margaret Sullivan recently noted in a column headlined "What's a journalist supposed to be now--an activist? A stenographer? You're asking the wrong question." To Sullivan the "core question" is this: "What journalism best serves the real interests of American citizens?"

      New York Times media writer Ben Smith also weighed in. America's "biggest newsrooms are trying to find common ground between a tradition that aims to persuade the widest possible audience that its reporting is neutral and journalists who believe that fairness on issues from race to Donald Trump requires clear moral calls," Smith noted, before declaring that this "shift in mainstream American media--driven by a journalism that is more personal, and reporters more willing to speak what they see as the truth without worrying about alienating conservatives--now feels irreversible."

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      Opinion
      'New Dissector, Democracy Projector': A Poet's Tribute to Danny Schechter

      'New Dissector, Democracy Projector': A Poet's Tribute to Danny Schechter

      What I'll always remember most about Danny Schechter, besides his friendship, was his passionate commitment to democratic principles--in every field from politics and economics to journalism and culture--and his amazing energy for brainstorming creative ideas.

      Eliot Katz
      Mar 26, 2015

      What I'll always remember most about Danny Schechter, besides his friendship, was his passionate commitment to democratic principles--in every field from politics and economics to journalism and culture--and his amazing energy for brainstorming creative ideas.

      I met Danny in 1988, when I was working with a group of Rutgers University students to organize a national conference whose goal was to try to start a new SDS-type, mass-based, democratically structured, multi-issue national student activist group. The project's main advisor was the late, great activist Abbie Hoffman, an old friend of Danny's. It was Abbie who had suggested that our Rutgers group invite Danny to be a key panelist at the conference. Throughout the years since that conference, I saw Danny dozens or maybe hundreds of times at political and cultural events, most recently at a number of Occupy Wall Street rallies, and we kept in touch often by emails and occasional restaurant meals.

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      Opinion
      Where Is the American Spring? (or Sunshine on a Cloudy Day)

      Where Is the American Spring? (or Sunshine on a Cloudy Day)

      From the Common Dreams archive

      Danny Schechter
      Mar 20, 2015

      [CD Editor's Note: While we mourn Thursday's passing of our friend and longtime contributor Danny Schechter, we celebrate his life and work today by offering this selection as a testimony to the power of his masterful ability to cut through current events with a wisdom honed by the past and an optimistic commitment to the future. If time allows in your day, dear reader, take the time to go through the scores of Schechter's other columns in our archive to see just a small portion of the wider body of work to which he dedicated his life. From his peristent role as a both a producer and critic of media to his commitment to peace and justice, Danny offered all of us an uncanny window into the mind of a person who chronicled the late 20th- and early 21st Century with equal shares of reverence for craft, rebelliousness of spirit, and deep caring for others. The following selection was originally published on March 30, 2014.]

      Where are you, Temptations, when I need you most?

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