Danny Schechter arrived at WBCN in 1970 as a volunteer, but quickly moved up to be news director when his predecessor, Bo Burlingham, was indicted by the federal government for his activities in the Weather Underground. Just as politically minded as Burlingham, Schechter tore into his new job with zeal and it wasn’t long before he adopted the now-famous handle that would remain with him throughout his career: “The News Dissector.”
“I was writing news [stories] for the deejays to read and I wasn’t the best of typists, so I would correct the copy with a pen,” he says. “[But] my penmanship was worse than my typing. At one point I handed Jim Parry some news which had my scrawl on it. He goes, ‘What’s this? You read this and I’m going to take a leak.’” Parry got behind the microphone and gave Schechter an impromptu windup: “He said something like, ‘I‘m going to introduce Danny Schechter – the news detector…the news inspector…the news dissector!’ So, thanks to Jim Parry, I adopted this brand.”
Union organizing, Boston Sunday Review, Move to TV/Internet
In 1973, Schechter, who had studied labor relations at Cornell, helped the staff organize into a union and became its first shop steward. That partnership was strong enough to win a strike at WBCN six years later when new owners fired 19 employees, including Schechter himself, then rehired them all. In 1978, when ‘BCN’s management reduced the amount of news programming, Schechter’s idea for a weekend news program resulted in The Boston Sunday Review, which he co-hosted. As a testament to its enduring popularity, the award-winning show continued to thrive beyond the demise of WBCN in 2009.
Schechter departed ‘BCN in 1980 to produce Matt Siegel’s local overnight TV show, Five All Night/Live at Night. After that, the “news dissector” transitioned into a long and distinguished career in network television and Internet news reporting. He blazed a bright spotlight on human right abuses around the world during his remaining years as a public voice until the “news dissector” was silenced by pancreatic cancer in 2015.
(by Carter Alan)
Carter Alan is a former WBCN deejay now heard on WZLX-FM in Boston. He is the author of Radio Free Boston: The Rise and Fall of WBCN (University Press of New England, 2013).
