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When PBS rejected Danny Schechter’s ground-breaking TV series “South Africa Now” in 1988, the network accused him of being an activist, not a reporter — for creating a show that was explicitly anti-apartheid.

Schechter and his longtime friend and partner Rory O’Connor distributed the series themselves to more than 150 independent PBS and cable stations — and then around the world.

Schechter, an iconic Emmy Award-winning TV producer, filmmaker, author, blogger and critic, who began his career at the counterculture radio station WBCN as the “News Dissector” in the 1970s, died of pancreatic cancer in New York on Thursday. He was 72.

He spent his working life combining his love of media with a drive to champion social justice.

“He was a protean figure,” O’Connor told the Herald yesterday, recalling the early days of Globalvision, a television and film production company he co-founded with Schechter in New York in 1988.

“We were working very hard under extreme circumstances. And we didn’t have a lot of money,” O’Connor said. “We would go home, and the next day I would find out he would have written a 5,000-word article in his spare time. He was relentless. It was beyond energy. It was a need to express himself as widely as often as possible in as many forms as possible.”

Perhaps no subject animated Schechter more than apartheid. While studying for a master’s degree from the London School of Economics in the 1960s, he met South Africans involved in the liberation movement. He later gained the trust of Nelson Mandela and made six documentaries about him. He also wrote the book “Madiba A to Z: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela.”

Schechter was instrumental in forming Artists United Against Apartheid, which culminated in a popular 1985 music video, “Sun City,” that included Steven Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen, Pat Benatar, Miles Davis and Run-DMC, among others, calling for a boycott of the South African tourist spot.

Schechter won his Emmys while producing ABC’s “20 20” and later worked in the early days of CNN.

He became a counterculture hero in Boston during the Vietnam War, when he manned the mic at ’BCN as the self-styled “News Dissector,” covering the day’s events with his own irreverent and unapologetically lefty spin.

On the Danny Schechter Memorial Page on Facebook, his onetime ’BCN colleague Charles Laquidara said, “Goodbye my friend and former co-worker … A billion alohas, raised fists and honorary salutes to you — the inimitable, incredible, wonderful, controversial, brilliant and legendary News Dissector.”

Another ’BCN alum, Carter Alan, the author of “Radio Free Boston: The Rise and Fall of WBCN,” posted, “When I think of Danny, I will always think of the word ‘truth.’ We could all hope for such an honorable eulogy.”

Schechter revisited the struggle in South Africa in a book released in January titled, “When South Africa Called, We Answered: How the Media and International Solidarity Helped Topple Apartheid.”

Former NPR foreign correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault posted: “Danny was consistent in his commitment to Human Rights all over the world, and used the media as Edward R. Murrow defined its mission: To teach, illuminate and inspire…. Long live, Danny, Long Live!”

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