WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception

Synopsis

Emmy Award-Winning Danny Schechter, ‘the News Dissector’, a 30-year media veteran and former ABC News and CNN producer, is the first professional journalist to make a feature-length independent film and write a book exposing media failures.

Schechter’s sixth book on media issues, Embedded: WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception investigates collusion between the military, giant media companies and the government. It goes inside the ‘media war’, and explains why Senator Robert Byrd is right in saying ‘The media fell for it, hook, line and sinker’. Schechter adds an outsider’s perspective to an insider’s experience in turning the cameras on the role the news networks played in distorting news and turning the military campaign into ‘mili-tainment’.

Schechter’s film includes never-before-seen footage from Iraq, insider information about Pentagon information warfare strategy and a report about torture at Baghdad’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison that predates the US network stories by eight months. The film investigates the embed program, ‘infiltrates’ Fox News and takes a global approach to analyzing coverage.

A year in the making, WMD represents guerrilla filmmaking without any backing from major media conglomerates.

As timely as today’s headlines, WMD comes on the heels of an admission by the New York Times that its pre-war coverage was deeply flawed, a view seconded by Michael Getler, ombudsman of the Washington Post. WMD adds to a growing debate within the U.S. news business about its coverage that differed dramatically from reporting seen around the world. ‘We have heard a lot of ‘chatter’ about ‘intelligence failures’ and ‘policy failures’, says outspoken director Schechter, an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter and one time Nieman Fellow in Journalism: ‘Now it’s time to look at media failures because the Bush Administration could never have won support for its deceptive policies if the media had not been complicit’.

Why You Should Watch it

WMD was the first film to ask how was the Iraq invasion sold? Danny’s emphatic delivery demonstrates how many of us, including this reviewer, were suckered into supporting an unwinnable war. WMD encapsulates why the big government/big media alliance succeeded and why it is so dangerous to a functioning democracy. The film was critically savaged as unpatriotic when it was first offered but is now required viewing for journalists, historians, soldiers and sociologists.

Press Reviews

Schechter's film raises some crucial issues... Whether you agree with that, and whether Schechter's oddly jaunty persona appeals to you or irritates you, Weapons of Mass Deception does open the door to an important discussion of the way in which this war played out in newspapers and on television sets across America.

Unknown

Schechter has the goods and by framing his argument with a history of independent war coverage past and present (the international press doesn't toe the Pentagon line) highlights how far we've fallen.

Unknown

OVER time, the most radical counterculture figures usually go from being controversial to merely provocative. But Danny Schechter, whose latest documentary film WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception) takes swipes at the media's coverage of the war in Iraq, is probably a few years off from being admitted into the mainstream.

Unknown

WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception is tough-minded and uncompromising.

Unknown

A timely rebuke to the ‘maybe Bush was right’ canard currently in circulation, WMD offers a rabble-rousing think piece about a conflict in which no thought of peace seems to be contemplated.

Unknown

WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception is a powerful expose that shows how TV news helped the Bush administration, and the Pentagon, manufacture consent for the Iraq war

Unknown

Weapons of Mass Deception leaves no stone unturned. Schechter traces the war from the embedded reporters to the retired generals drawing on teleprompters like the war was a football game. Can we have a true democracy without a truthful media? It’s a great question implicitly asked by Danny Schechter’s brilliant new film, Weapons of Mass Deception.

Unknown

Further information on Media Manipulation:

Further information on Media Manipulation: The producers own website is a great resource with a 30 minute ‘Making of’ feature, teachers notes, extensive background notes and information on how to get more involved. The production company Global Vision also has other documentaries you may be interested in.

The Centre for Media and Democracy aims to strengthen participatory democracy by investigating and exposing PR spin and propaganda, and by promoting media literacy and citizen journalism. It’s a huge site with reams of constantly updated information. Media Matters is a non-profit website comprehensively monitoring, analysing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. Global Issues has a page on the role of Media in war campaigns as well as other related information, while FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) is a media watch group, that has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986. The National Security Archive has a report titled ‘Iraq : The Media War Plan’ offering a very in-depth look at their own campaign from a purely practical and non-judgemental (or ethical) perspective.

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