Daniel Isaac Schechter was born in Manhattan, New York on June 27, 1942. He received a bachelor's degree from Cornell University. While there, he organized rent strikes in Harlem and marched for civil rights in Washington, D. C. and in the South. He received a master's degree from the London School of Economics, where he became active in the antiapartheid movement. In 1971, he joined the Boston rock station WBCN-FM, where he found a following as Danny Schechter, the News Dissector. As a producer of the ABC News magazine 20/20, his work won two Emmy Awards. In 1988, he and Rory O'Connor founded Globalvision, which produced Rights and Wrongs: Human Rights Television and South Africa Now, a weekly public affairs program that won a George Polk Award in 1990. During his lifetime, he wrote 17 books including The More You Watch the Less You Know: News Wars/(Sub)Merged Hopes/Media Adventures and Madiba A-Z: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela. He also made more than 30 films, including six documentaries on Nelson Mandela and another entitled WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception. He died of pancreatic cancer on March 19, 2015 at the age of 72.