Conversations With Harold Hudson Channer: Russ Baker 2012

Harold Channer has a conversation with Russ Baker on February 28, 2012.

Russ Baker is an old-fashioned muckraking journalist and pamphleteer using the newest technologies. In his reporting and writing he brings the best of mainstream methods (balance and rigor) to the alternative media, and the best of the alternative media (passion for the truth and the larger story) to the mainstream. He focuses on getting past the rhetoric to expose the hidden levers and machinations that shape our world. Bakers investigative reporting, analysis pieces, features, and essays on politics, power, and perceptions have appeared in many of the worlds finest publications.

In 2004, Baker devoted himself largely to researching stories that provided disturbing insights into the pre-presidential behavior of George W. Bush. He also explored the integrity of the voting system and examined instances of alleged election fraud.

In 2005, Baker founded Who What Why/The Real News Project, a news organization dedicated to producing ground-breaking, transformative, independent investigative journalism.

In 2009, Bakers book, FAMILY OF SECRETS: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America was published by Bloomsbury Press.

Over the past two decades, Baker has produced over a thousand stories, most of them for magazines and newspapers and online publications — but also for television and radio — on a broad range of topics, from political revolutions to revolutionary humor. He has pursued stories in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Among other things, Baker covered Hutu-Tutsi massacres in Central Africa, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the overthrow of the longtime Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. He spent one and a half years as a correspondent and investigative reporter based in the former Yugoslavia. When not wrestling with traditional hard-news and politics, he has written essays and critiques, and profiles of colorful and controversial figures, from the notorious murderer-on-the-run Ira Einhorn (whom Baker caught up with in the French countryside) to the irreverent tv culinary hero, Iron Chef Morimoto, as he was preparing to open his first restaurant.

Baker has been a member of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Harold Hudson Channer is a television producer & talk-show host on public-access television cable TV network Manhattan Neighborhood Network, or MNN. He is the longest-running producer for the network, having done approximately 2,700 interviews over 40 years. He is the host of Conversations with Harold Hudson Channer. The show was initiated in 1973.

He also was a university professor of geography at:

New York State University, California State University, Utah State University, Wayne State University, Southern Illinois University and received his Ph.D. (ABD) degree among other degrees.