PAI is hosting a free screening of Danny Schechter’s new documentary, In Debt We Trust, on June 28, 7 p.m. at Key Cinemas, 4044 S. Keystone Ave. The Right-of-Way (RoW) had the opportunity to talk with Mr. Schechter about his film and other media issues; following are excerpts of that conversation.

RoW: Danny Schechter, you’re an award-winning producer of television shows and documentary films, you’re an author….

DS: A filmmaker and a troublemaker….

RoW: Get all your credits in. Ned Martel at the New York Times called you a ‘media gadfly.’

DS: I’ve been in the media biz for 30 years: I’ve been in radio, 20/20 for 8 years, I’ve won Emmy awards, Globalvision for 20 years, made a lot of films—if that’s a gadfly, so be it. I also edit MediaChannel.org, which is a globally recognized online forum for media issues…. I’m known around the world as “The News Dissector,” suggestive of a technique I like to use—to get beneath the surface and pick away at the obvious realities to get at deeper truths and that’s what I try to do as a journalist.

RoW: And that’s what you’re trying to do in In Debt We Trust. What turned you to the consumer debt story?

DS: First of all, I was looking for an issue that could help bring Americans together, and the debt issue is something that can bring people together because so many people suffer—Republicans as well as Democrats; Blacks as well as Whites; Latinos—this is something that cuts across the spectrum of American life, because of the way debt has become a driving force in the American economy.

I became more and more informed about it and more and more angry about it, because there’s a transfer of wealth going on in this country from the middle class and poor people to the vaults of rich institutions. Literally billions of dollars are being transferred.

And this is part of the changing nature of our society. We’ve moved from production to consumption. Credit cards went from being a luxury to being a necessity to being a noose around the necks of many people.

We have a climate with very little regulation and very little consumer protection. So that’s what I investigated in this film, In Debt We Trust. Besides that, we’ve set up a campaign for debt relief in America, like Bono is doing in Africa. We’re saying, “We need debt relief here.” We have a website, StopTheSqueeze.org—Americans for Debt Relief Now. This is a program to try to do something about this problem politically.

RoW: Right, so with Stop the Squeeze, what tools are you using?

DS: A big issue right now is public awareness. How do we get people informed about this issue? This situation is hard to organize around because people don’t like to talk about money and they don’t realize that other people they know are also suffering the way they are because they don’t talk about money.

So we’re trying to get this issue out of the closet so to speak so people begin to talk about it, think about it, and see what we can do about it.

The financial geniuses and all these brilliant people who run these companies are operating in their own interests, not in the public interest. They’re not out to protect us or to ensure that there’s any kind of fairness in the economy. And that’s why we need new rules of the game—we need regulation, we need rules to guarantee fair lending, we need full disclosure, we need accountability, we need consumer protection.

RoW: We need to segue into the whole media reform issue. We’re working to bring public access back to Indy.

DS: Issues are not really explained in the media. Instead we get images, we get impressions, and we get misinformation. And that’s why also we need public access. Because we need more voices -- not just more choices in terms of a million more channels all saying the same thing. We need diversity, we need to hear from people, we need to get their points of view and perspectives; we need a real democracy. This is what our democracy was supposed to be all about. It was supposed to be a marketplace of ideas; instead it’s become just a marketplace.

We’re underdeveloped when it comes to knowing about the world and knowing what’s going on in our own society. This is a challenge to all of us. I joined the media to spotlight problems of the world, and then I came to realize that media is one of the problems of the world, but it’s often not acknowledged as such.

So we have to try to make the media not only responsive and responsible to the public, but also we need to make the media open to other voices and other points of view. And that’s what we’re trying to do with mediachannel.org, that’s what I’m trying to do with some of my films—to offer another perspective….

We need other voices, and that’s what public access can provide. That’s why it’s important.

RoW: One last question, Indianapolis and the world recently lost our native author, Kurt Vonnegut. What’s your favorite Vonnegut book?

DS: Well, Kurt Vonnegut was a great man, needless to say. He was an advocate for freedom of expression and free speech. He cared, and the lesson of his caring is that we have to care too. We have to care about what we put into our bodies in terms of food, what we put into our minds in terms of media, and what we put into our pockets in terms of loans. All these things are related—we need to think of them in an organic, connecting-the-dots kind of way.

Kathleen Dobie is a writer/editor/journalist/activist.