Saturday Feature - Hacking Democracy

Bev Harris at Black Box Voting teamed up with Simone Ardizzone, Russel Michaels and Robert Carillo Cohen to create what was first called Voteregate. Votergate was a huge web success and it was later picked up by HBO, renamed Hacking Democracy and turned into a full length Documentary . It is very revealing about this whole new age of voting on computers and trusting that they count the vote correctly even though people these days are still afraid to buy stuff on the internet because of how hackable computers are.

Comedy: Twistedhumor.com - Know Jack Schitt

Twistedhumor.com seems to have been an email list from back in the late 90's that would send out jokes. The best I can tell now is that it is no longer functioning. If I go to the website I get an offer for a money making scheme on myspace. This video is halarious, though so I thought it deserved notice.

Commentary: Sam Seder - On Brave New Films

Brave New Films appears to be reaching out more for video contributors to their blog. Sam Seder, a talk show host on Air America Radio introduces the concept. Sam also speaks to the importaincs of web video. Web video's influence over elections is becoming very important. For the first time the people are moving the conversation and creating their own buzz and the media is having a downright hard time controlling the narrative. The CNN YouTube debate is the most recent example of web video's direct effect on modern politics. The internet may just save America from complete corporate takeover if we can keep their grubby hands off net neutrality.

Thanks goes out to C&L for pushing it into the blogosphere proper.

Video Activism: Billy Vegas - How To Create An Angry American

Billy Vegas is the featured name on www.puppetgov.com who posts these videos via their YouTube page. I Can't find much out yet about who they are but it appears to me like another great example of grass roots video activism. This particular video uses this administrations own words to show how corrupt they are. It also shows how some people are reacting to this outrage.

Comedy: Best Prank Call Ever

This made me laugh so loud I just had to post it. I don't have much info on the creators other than it is posted by a YouTube Account named ascensions and it is credited to the Greensboro Daily Planet Blog.

Politics: Politics TV - Dr. Dahlia Wasfi testifying to congress about Iraq

Politics TV is an independent Media site put together by PTV Media, an independent production and consulting firm. They are focused on the power of the web to get independent perspectives bringing information to people on video, about politics in particular. They do web syndication in podcast type format and they also have a YouTube Page with over 655 videos on it ranging from senate hearings to the presidential debates to their own original programming.

This clip struck me as an incredibly powerful testimony, at the Democratic Congressional forum on Iraq, that puts a human perspective on Iraq in a way that the "dog and pony show" visits from politicians and media pundits just can't capture. The YouTube link describes it like this:

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi was born to a Jewish mother and an Iraqi father. She recently put her medical career on hold to visit with family members in Iraq, and recently returned from a three-month stay in Basrah and Baghdad. Dr. Wasfi described her experience in Iraq and discussed the life of Iraqis under occupation on April 27, 2006 in Washington, DC.

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.

Comedy: Red State Update - Bush's Colonoscopy

Jackie and Dunlap have been YouTube stars, among other internet outlets, for a while now but they got a huge boost lately as a result of the CNN YouTube debate which they submitted several questions to, at least one of which was used. This got the attention of CNN who then began doing post debate interviews with them. In this episode they discuss Bush's colonoscopy and Michael Moore going to Cuba.

Saturday Feature: MEF - Peace Propaganda and The Promised land

Another great documentary by The Media Education Foundation. This one examines the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the way the media shapes people's opinions about it.

Education: Ken Schooland/Kerry Pearson - The Philosophy of Liberty

I posted a link to the flash version of this video in a past post but it really needs to be highlighted so I found the embeddable YouTube version and I am giving it it's own spot. It addresses issues of liberty and, in particular, the danger presented by people who want surrogates to defend their liberty for them rather than doing it themselves:

It is based on part of a very influential book by Ken Schooland named The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible. They also have a website based the book. that features the video.