Politics: NetCenter08 - GOP YouTube Debate

I have been very caught up in things lately so I apologize for the lapse in posting.

I think this video is an excellent representation of the possible future of media. Dubbed "NetCenter08," It is 2 new media personalities: Dan Manatt from Politics TV.com, and David All from TechRepublican.com to discuss the latest CNN Republican Presidential debate which used YouTube questions.

It looks to me like they are talking on webcams much like the old media talks through satellite links. These two webcam videos are then composited together with some graphics and footage from the debates. It is a really good use of widely available, relatively low cost, technology to create the look and feel of your typical news debate. Because it is coming from the netroots rather than TV producers, this conversation feels more authentic to me. I hope we see more of this format. Todays TV media feels more like a pro wrestling circus among elite media pundits and hosts. That is what the old media thinks is good television but it has been done to death. This new media technology can bring more diversity to the national conversation. That is what this site is created to celebrate.

As for this CNN YouTube Debate, I like the national town hall format that it represents. The problem for me is in the details, however. Stalin once said that it's not who votes, it's who counts the votes. In this case it's not who asks the questions, it's who chooses the questions that make it in. There were 5000 submissions for this debate. CNN chose somewhere around 34 questions without any input from anyone but CNN. Now, do you think if CNN had a list of questions they wanted to ask ahead of time that they couldn't find one of the 5000 that asked it for them? What's to stop them? In that sense this whole thing feels more like an exploitation of the new media as a pool for low cost content ideas and as a marketing gimmick rather than an authentic tool of democracy. In that measure, it troubles me.

I have the same issue with Current TV. They talk about democratizing the media by letting anyone submit things but that is useless if some group of staff TV producers then gets to choose from those submissions and sit down with editors and change the perspective, or cut stuff out and put on their own graphics to "punch it up". How is this any different from approaching any producer anywhere to pitch our work? The democracy is in letting the people decide what goes on the air and putting it on as chosen. It is not bestowing people with the privilege of pitching your video to a media person. In this area both CNN and Current TV are failing the democratic potential of the web media. When these old media and new media representatives decide they will have the guts to put real democracy into the process, then they can talk about how great and innovative their ideas are. Until then they are just selling used cars with a new paint job.

If you want to see real political democracy in action go to 10questions.com THAT is a YouTube town hall forum worth praising. Both PoliticsTV and TechRepublican and tons of other netroots organizations are sponsors. On that site you submit YouTube videos and then vote for the ones you want and the top 10 are presented to the candidates to make their own response videos. The submission and voting phase is over but the questions chosen are all good and it will be nice to hear some answers. You also get to vote on how well each candidate's answers to the questions are. So far Mike Huckabee, Rona Paul and John Edwards have agreed to participate. Barack Obama also answered 1 question by putting in a clip from one of his speeches as an answer. You can send a mass email to every candidate from their website. Please do so if you want to support real democracy in the new media.

Video Activism - Foxattacks.com - Behind Fox Attacks

This video tells the story behind the net roots movement that has become known as the "Fox Attacks" series. It covers several very important points about the power of video activism as it relates to the internet. Web producers should pay attention. You can do a lot more than just film your dog on a skateboard these days.

Robert Greenwald founded foxattacks.com as an answer to the distortions and propaganda that Fox News creates in their very agenda driven excuse for reporting. The Fox motto is "We Report, You Decide" but the reporting is so slanted that it is designed to help you arrive at the conclusion they want. Foxattacks.com has countered with the slogan "They Distort, We Reply." The victory that helped move this website into provenance in the blogosphere is the influence that they had, with the help of other online activists, on the Nevada Democratic Presidential debate that was supposed to be hosted by Fox. The argument was that Fox is not a legitimate news organization and therefore, they could not be trusted to host an event of such important public interest. I could not agree more.

The pressure of this movement was so strong that the major candidates, beginning with John Edwards, backed out of the debate and the Nevada Democrats eventually folded and backed out themselves. I consider this a major public relations victory for journalism. For the first time there was a very large and very public blow back against the Fox News brand.

In my view, we need more activism like this because Fox News is activism on a massive scale. Fox tells their audience what they want to hear based on the conservative agenda rather than what they need to hear based on objective reality. Fox also slants the stories to the benefit of themselves and their political allies and to the harm political opponents, all under the audacious title of "Fair and Balanced".

Their claim to balance is not that their individual stories are balanced but, rather, that their bias as an organization helps to "balance" out the bias of the "liberal media." The problem is that the "liberal media" holds the ORIGINAL ideal of balance first represented by the Fairness Doctrine and journalistic ethics. This definition says that they strive to give equal weight to both sides of any controversial story. Individual reporters can slip in both directions, at times but the goal of each story is supposed to be true balance. Those who are not following this practice are either bad journalists or editorial writers. At Fox, slating the story is the ideal. The majority of the programming is also editorializing and opining over events rather than trying to provide the facts in an objective way. This is not journalism and it does not deserve the respect or privileges that are attached to journalism.

In todays media journalism is failing and a great deal of the reason behind that is that Fox news has almost single handedly changed the definition of what journalism means. Journalism today means making money off stories not providing importaint information about issues of great public interest. The public is left to "decide" based on criteria that is first tested for ratings value. That is the Fox effect. If there were no political angle at all this would still be a great harm to the "fourth estate" that Fox has helped bring. The political angle just makes it twice as bad.

Lets take a look at the Fox Attacks examination of the latest issue Fox covered: The General Petraeus hearings, which were critical to the public understanding about the progress in the Iraq war. The very lives of our soldiers are at stake here so it is vital that we all know exactly where things stand. How was Fox's coverage of this event? Well. They sat down and counted the stories that were for and against the facts that Petraeus laid out and edited it all together. See for yourself:

Journalism: The Real News Network: Jeff Cohen On TheREALnews

The Real News Network is a project begun by and organization by the name of Independent World Television. Their goal is to create a non profit, independent, cable news network that will first launch on the internet this fall and then move to TV a year or so after that. An introductory video which they call The Promise can be found on the front page of their website and as the featured video on their YouTube account. They are hiring professional journalists from all over the world to contribute and they will have no financial ties to corporations or government and no commercials. The reasoning is that information should not be a for profit venture because that corrupts it. I happen to agree. Just think about the ratings mongers who run the news shows today and want sexy, novelty and celebrity content for ratings. Think about how they define their success on those ratings rather than the quality of the content or the service they provide. Consider that corporations have been known to pull advertising for their products if a news story on that channel paints them in a bad light. When you consider how one parent corporation could represent hundreds of products to be advertised that represents a whole lot of influence.

Jeff Cohen (not to be confused with the child actor) is a former cable news host and producer and today he is a respected media critic. He is also the founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting a watchdog group that collects information on the news media for analysis. They check things like how many liberal viewpoints are featured on cable news shows vs. conservative viewpoints (as many as 5 to 1 I believe). They also noticed that PBS has lots of investor shows and business shows that feature owners and business leaders but not one show that represents the labor movement. He is appearing on The Real News Network here to talk about the corruption that exists in todays mainstream media and to explain how important a project like this is.

Video Activism: Brave New Films - Fox Attacks Global Warming and Bloggers

Brave New Films is once again documenting the deliberate smearing of serious issues that Fox News advocates in it's programming.

Fox On Global Warming:

This is a Catalog of errors they have represented on global warming during their broadcasts.



Fox On Bloggers:

With no substantial proof that I have seen, Fox has characterized the liberal blogs as outlets of hate. The "hate speech" they provide are from the comments sections of the postings where anyone, including Fox producers could post with anonymity. Anyone who has ever seen comment sections know that people can get really ugly. Go to any popular YouTube video page and there are often several off the rocker, foaming at the mouth, nonsense posts that you just blow off. None of the "hate speech" cited by Fox is ever from the blog articles themselves. The quotes they will find from the bloggers themselves are usually tame when compared to right wing talkers like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter.




Let there be no doubt about my feelings on this issue: Fox News is the enemy of anyone who wants real information. They have created a slick, car salesman like, image with groovy graphics, controversy hungry hosts and hot blond anchors with tons of lip gloss. This entertainment packaging of news brings ratings and, as a result, the other news programmers in the country have jumped to imitate it. It's just good capitalism after all right? Unless, of course, the purpose is to get real information out.

What it is is the perversion of the whole news industry and a redefining of the word "balance". In a coordinated assault with talk radio and mega church broadcasters, Fox smeared the idea of "liberals" so that nobody in their audience would ever believe anything they say. They then went on to smear the rest of the news world as both "liberal" and "unbalanced" in order to convince these same people that they need Fox's brand of news if they really want the truth. All the while, Fox is as brazenly biased and idealogical as they want to be. They justify this by saying they are "balancing" out all those liberal media outlets. Get it? It's not the coverage itself that is fair and balanced. It is Fox, the slanted spin job propaganda outlet, "balancing" out the flow of "liberal"(formerly known as "journalistic") information in the national dialog. This means if "liberals" say there is gravity, they will have someone on arguing that there is no agreement on gravity to provide "both sides of the story." If the existence of gravity is dangerous to their ideological purpose, they will have one soft spoken intellectual arguing for gravity and two loud aggressive debaters arguing against it. All the while their audience has been conditioned to believe that liberals are too confused to bother listening to what they say.

This model of getting both sides of a story, one that is factually true and one that is factually false, has even begun to make appearances on other news outlets who have taken Fox's dog and pony show success to be a sign that the rest of them must really be "too liberal." So we now have news outlets falling over themselves to be more "Fox like." It is, perhaps, the most public and successful con job on an open information industry that has ever existed.

This is why I have so much respect for Brave New Films. They have taken Fox on directly and they are building a movement to begin calling them out for what they are. If you are a network with a 4 minute "straight news" break every half hour followed by 28 minutes of hosts and pundits spouting opinions can you really call yourself news? I think Fox can say anything it wants. This is a free country, but they should not be allowed to present themselves as either "fair and balanced" or a "news outlet" unless they meet the same specific journalistic standards that the rest of the news media was trying to follow before Fox arrived. I urge everyone to get active on this issue because this is really about getting good information so we can make hard decisions. It's not about tailoring all the the information we get so that it fits into what we WANT to hear. That puts us in a bubble where we can be controlled and manipulated.

If you haven't seen their feature film Outfoxed yet, I highly recommend it. It elaborates much more clearly on what I have said here. If you want to get more directly involved become a Fox Attacker.

Public Speech: Michael Papantonio - The Mainstream Media is Dead

GoLeft Tv describe themselves like this:

GoLeft.tv is an innovative, web-based television and multimedia center featuring political, social and entertainment news and commentary from a Progressive angle, advocating a more enlightened, intelligent view of America and the world.

Michael Papantonio is one of the founders of GoLeft TV. He is a public advocate and a talk show host on Air America Radio. The above video is from their archives and it is a public speech that Michael gave to Canadians about their media. He goes over the failings of the American media over the last 29 years and warns Canadians that it is time to draw a line in the sand.

I think this is a very powerful video because it explains exactly what motivates me and the other contributors to this blog. Our American news is dead. It has been killed by various deregulations and the eliminations of standards of fairness. What we have today is a dog and pony show pretending to be the news. With some exception, one is lucky these days if you get 5 minutes worth of good information out of a 1 hour broadcast.

News: Michael Moore Calls out CNN

It is a snowballs day in hell that you will see a clip from CNN on this blog but that day just arrived and doubled up because this is extraordinary.

CNN aired this hit piece on Michael Moore's latest movie Sicko:





They then, unwisely, had Michael Moore on live after playing it to get his response. Boy did he respond. He went ballistic on them and said pretty much everything I ever wanted to say to the mainstream media. God bless Michael Moore.




As promised, Michael also provided his own fact checkers for CNN's report and he put the results on his website.

Public Speech: RFK - The Fairness Doctrine

This is a great public speech by RFK Jr. about the fairness doctrine, how we lost it, and what that means. More people need to think about this stuff.

Mission Statement

We are the new media generation! We've got cameras and we know how to use them! We're here to crash the party that the big media gatekeepers have been having at our expense for about the past 25 years. If it's relevant, independently produced video using the web and we can find it, talk about it or make it ourselves, we want to share it here. We love the new developments the web is bringing when it comes to sharing information on video. We see every new video we find out there as another crash of the battering ram against the gates of the media conglomerates, especially the TV news media.

The universe of internet video is growing larger every day. A lot of it is just promotions or clips from regular old TV and a lot more of it is barely watchable. Then there's all the cute pet and people tricks. . . . The good news is that there are also a lot of great independent video producers and journalists out there that are just starting to come into their own in this new outlet. It is their work we want to share with you.

We are web video producers ourselves and we want to bring our own voices to the table in this universe but we also want to help show you all the great stuff by other people who inspire us. We want to seek them out from many different domains and bring them all together here in one convenient place where we can all learn from what we find.

You are important in this journey too. Let us know if we miss something:

mediacrashers@gmail.com


What Kind of Media Do We Post?

We look at all kinds of media but Media Crashers is primarily a web video related site. Pictures, articles audio and other media forms will will show up here but the primary focus is on good video content that is independent of media conglomerates and originating on the web.

There is no particular subject that we want to stick with or exclude. You will find a little of everything. It could be a music video, a creative slide show, a documentary, a short film. It could be entertaining or informational or both. It could be news, commentary, politics, technology, cooking, skiing, fishing. . . you get the idea.

One thing you can count on is that our choices will usually be examples of what we consider the "new media." This is a development over the past 5 years that began with the text based blogs and is now quickly incorporating audio and video. It is a wildly independent media being built by ordinary people and creative entrepreneurs.

Another thing you can count on here is that the media we post will usually have a meaningful perspective. We want to show the world that the work being done on the web is more than pets, stunts and webcam videos. There is a growing body of independent producers doing good work on their own out here that is really beginning to show some relevance. Distribution is the final frontier for the desktop video producer and YouTube is just the first ship that started bringing people there to explore it. The very definitions of "People's Media" and "New Media" are still being written. We want to help show what we think they are becoming.

Finally, we generally look for work that stands out to us in some way. This is hard to define. It may be a story that isn't being told by the mainstream news or a famous person doing independent work outside the system. It could be something that is a past web video success somehow and we are cataloging it. It could be something that got grass roots recognition like lots of views on YouTube. It may be an inspiring approach or technique, it could be something that makes a great statement or a point that needs to be made, it could be just a great work of art.

This is all a tall order we know. Fortunately, we love digging this kind of stuff up so hopefully we can get it right more often than not.