A post by Cynthia sent me over to The Nation’s web site to check out some of the articles in the publication’s July 3 National Entertainment State issue. One of the first I saw, by filmmaker and political activist Robert Greenwald, struck me as important. While the piece was aimed at left-leaning readers of The Nation, its message seems to apply more broadly.
Greenwald said that, while his production company, Brave New Films “spent relative pennies on [a] satirical ad promoting its new film, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price,” the ad became “a viral hit” and “the number-two trailer on iFilm.”
We used our online expertise (developed in short order over the past four films) and our amazing 150 organizational partners (recruited by our in-house organizer in advance) to solicit and publicize screenings of the DVD in schools, churches, homes, union halls, pizza parlors—any place there was a TV set and a DVD player. We reached 700,000 people in one week with the Wal-Mart film. Likewise, through similar methods, our film Outfoxed hit number one on Amazon with zero money spent on traditional ads.
Greenwald also noted that his Brave New Films associate Jim Gilliam has developed a software program “that anyone can use to host a screening—a political or indie filmmaker, a politician wanting to show a film—anyone who wants to recruit participants for a screening. And it is free!”
But Greenwald, an experienced producer, also understands the importance of high-quality content and storytelling, as well as the differences in media:
We also need to put time, energy and resources into how we tell stories. The form, the length, the size of the image, will affect whether or not our stories are heard. We all need to begin experimenting and figuring out how to tell a story for the cellphone. One thing I know: It’s not the same as telling a story for a full-length DVD or theatrical screening.
With our next film, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, we will use all the latest techniques to reach different audiences, to tell the story in film, in viral pieces, for iPods and for cellphones. It’s a new-media era, for sure. And those who are quickest, smartest and most creative—not those who have the most money or own the most media outlets—are the ones who are going to get their messages out.
Greenwald’s piece reminded me what I love about the Internet and why I think it’s a vital element of 21st century economic and political infrastructure—one that would bring a smile to the face of both Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson.
By enabling relatively friction-free information flows, the Internet’s basic architecture supports the “invisible hand” that makes for healthy and vibrant capitalism, as well as the entrepreneurial-driven “creative destruction” described by Schumpeter.
At the same time, combined with low-cost media production tools, a neutral Internet greatly lowers the financial costs of a First Amendment megaphone to rival those wielded by corporate giants (as Greenwald’s experience suggests). This, in turn, promises to help move our political democracy out of the one-dollar/one-vote mode back in the direction of one-person/one-vote.
As I’ve said here before, I think an appreciation of this value is what fuels support for net neutrality and municipal broadband. And, to some extent, it may be fear of too much “creative destruction” impacting our current economic and political structures that fuels opposition to these two related movements. These different views of “creative destruction” also help fuel the antagonism between mainstream media and much of the blogging community, as well as the pitched battle over copyright protection. Personally, I’m hoping for a peaceful (r)evolution in our economic and political systems built around a neutral Internet. And I’d like to believe that both Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson, if they were alive today, would be as well.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 10:07 PM | Print | Comments (0)For those who missed it, The Nation’s most recent past issue (dated July 3) focused on the state of the media. Along with a series of articles (more below), The Nation updated its chart on The National Entertainment State.
This chart is a visually stunning depiction of the far-reaching ownership slate of the top media companies and it’s an impressive piece of work. You can click on the thumbnail for a better view — it downloads a PDF.
As impressive as the chart is, it’s also incomplete. The Nation is stuck in the 1980s — the magazine only included media companies that own major broadcast television networks, as if that were an ongoing requirement for a media titan. No cable operators such as the nation’s number one company Comcast, no web-based companies such as Yahoo! or Google, no blogs, and so forth.
Maybe this selective vision drives The Nation’s opinion that our news and information is still under the tight grip of just a few media conglomerates.
It is the power that a handful of corporations continue to wield over the media we consume—even the new media of a supposedly liberating Internet—that ought to concern us as citizens. It is not enough to hope that the Internet will set us free.
Admire the chart for the craftsmanship it is, but don’t believe the spin that there isn’t a diversity of media sources out there. Compare today to 1970, for example, when at most there were only three broadcast news outlets and two local papers, plus a handful of weekly news magazines. Who could possibly say that society hasn’t progressed in terms of diversity of viewpoints compared to what we had just one generation ago? Who cares about the now-four broadcast networks when so much information is pumped out by millions of new sources via the Internet?
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:55 PM | Print | Comments (0)
(McLean, VA) If nothing else, the final session at Friday’s Digital Media Conference affirmed the innate wonkishness of Washington. Not only did the “Net Neutrality” session run into a 30- minute overtime (an anomaly in most professions, especially on a steamy summer Friday evening when the event’s cocktail party had already begun), but the partisan panelists engaged in that familiar Capitol Hill practice of vote counting.
For example, Christopher Putala, Earthlink’s executive VP for public policy, told me that he expects the Senate Commerce Committee may split evenly at 11-11 or could come in at 12-10. In either case, he suggested, the close committee decision would not send a clear signal to the Senate to adopt Sen. Ted Stevens’ Communications, Consumers’ Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006 (S. 2686) if the bill actually comes up for a floor vote.
“Unless there’s something that balances it out, we’re not going to get legislation this year,” Putala said hopefully. And he emphasized that there is “not enough compromise” in the telco-backed legislation, which is laden with amendments as it continues through Committee mark-up this week.
Another panelist, Earl Comstock, president of Comptel, an association of competitive suppliers and vendors, focused on existing Verizon and AT&T structures that, he claims, already bias the market. Comstock cited Verizon’s costly DSL offer in the Washington area of $180 per month for 30 Mbps service as a way in which the telco already manipulates service structure and usage.
Countering those arguments was Scott Cleland, ostensibly an independent researcher/analyst as head of the Precursor Group. At this session, Cleland spouted data points in his role as spokesman for NetCompeition.org, which he said represents 2,000 companies including wireless and cable carriers. Among Cleland’s arguments for carrier control over network traffic prioritization was this factoid: a streamed two-hour high definition video movie consumes the capacity of 35,000 emails.
The Net Neutrality session was a last-minute addition to the fourth annual Digital Media Conference in suburban Washington. The one-day event attracted about 475 attendees, about 50% more than last year. Its “Law and Policy” track included a predictable copyright slap-down between MPAA and RIAA on one side and the Consumer Electronics Association on the other – with lobbyists for the Digital Media Association and games-centric Entertainment Software Association gasping for microphone time. The movie and music lobbyists also focused extensively on the merits of Sen. Diane Feinstein’s “PERFORM Act” (Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music Act of 2006, S. 2644), which would require satellite, cable and Internet broadcasters to pay fair market value for the performance of digital music.
The panel also touched on the ways in which social network customers create derivative works by doctoring copyrighted content, prompting MPAA’s Fritz Attaway to cite the infringement on artists’ rights.
While the policy sessions generated passionate arguments, the conference’s content and business panels underscored the revitalization of the interactive business itself. Chris Maxcy, VP-business development of YouTube, acknowledged that his site is now serving up to 70 million streams per day, with typical sessions averaging one to two minutes long – and thus “catering to the ADD generation.”
Maxcy was among the many panelists who emphasized that user-generated content (such as the home videos carried on YouTube) and social networks are a primary factor in today’s evolution of consumer Internet services.
Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications Inc, a Bethesda, MD, media/telecom research firm, has analyzed the convergence of digital media applications for more than 20 years. He can be reached at GaryArlen@engineer.com
Posted by Gary Arlen at 2:33 PM | Print | Comments (0)
In a testament to the power of blogging in politics, a complex, mud-slinging, all-out fight has erupted among liberal writers, much to the glee of scribes on the right. It’s a complicated tale whose moral is this: the blogosphere is a potent new force in politics and traditional writers of all ideological stripes think this development stinks.
The target of the punches is The Daily Kos, the unbelievably powerful liberal blog that Democrats now bow to given its mighty mobilization powers. The real target is not the institution of Daily Kos but its founder Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (aka Kos).
Here’s the history: Jason Zengerle of The New Republic posted an item about a piece (behind a firewall, sorry) written by the New York Times’ Chris Suellentrop that linked Kos’ collaborator Jerome Armstrong’s work for Democratic candidates to alleged illegal stock-touting that Armstrong is accused of commiting in 2000. The nasty allegation here is that Armstrong is working as a consultant for Democratic candidate Mark Warner and that Armstrong is doing for politics what he did for stock trading in 2000 — using a web site, namely Daily Kos, to tout favorites that he has a financial stake in.
As Zengerle stated more clearly in a follow-up item,
Are Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas (of the famous Daily Kos) engaged in a pay-for-play scheme in which politicians who hire Armstrong as a consultant get the support of Kos?
In that same item, Zengerle purports to reprint an email sent by Kos to an elite group of liberal bloggers urging them to keep their traps shut about the allegations.
It’s a deliberate strategy orchestrated by Kos. TNR obtained a missive Kos sent earlier this week to “Townhouse,” a private email list comprising elite liberal bloggers, including Jane Hamsher, Matt Stoller, and Christy Hardin Smith. And what was Kos’s message to this group that secretly plots strategy in the digital equivalent of a smoke-filled backroom? Stay mum!
The liberal blogosphere then went on the attack to proclaim the emails produced by Zengerle as “fake.” The blogosphere practically hit tilt with the rabid attacks on Zengerle and The New Republic. Here’s Glenn Greenwald’s accusation that Zengerle is TNR’s new Stephen Glass, the infamous TNR writer who made up facts and stories.
Zengerle owes his readers and The New Republic an explanation, and soon. Did Zengerle really have three sources for these e-mails (as he claimed), or did he simply receive things from an anonymous source and then blindly rely on the veracity of what he was sent, only to claim that it was from “three sources” in order (a la Jason Leopold) to enhance the credibility of his claims? Or, a la Stephen Glass, did Zengerle simply fabricate e-mails in order to bolster his “story”?
Kos himself urged readers to quit TNR, saying that the “Liberman-worshipping neo-con” publication had completed its migration to the “right.”
If you still hold a subscription to that magazine, it really is time to call it quits. If you see it in a magazine rack, you might as well move it behind the National Review or even NewsMax, since that’s who they want to be associated with these days.
Martin Podhoretz, publisher and chief editor of TNR, then lobbed a reply back at Kos saying that until June 23, he had never read the Daily Kos (ouch!) and that the publication is “illiterate.” More than that, he accuses Kos of being, well, crazy.
And his rant against us, well, borders on a nut case’s. When a high- minded or, rather, high-strung moralist is accused by The New York Times of journalistic hanky-panky and then by TNR of running an ideological censorship bureau, reminiscent of the old Catholic Legion of Decency, he will go off the rails. And he did.
The right-wing bloggers are, of course, loving this. The fight has broken into full public view with today’s op-ed piece by right-leaning New York Times’ columnist David Brooks. In his piece (which, again, is behind a firewall) Brooks sides with Podhoretz and calls Kos a “Kingpin of the Keyboards.” (I can’t imagine than any NYT reader not steeped in the arcana of this fight understanding a word of Brooks’ column.)
The Keyboard Kingpin, aka Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, sits at his computer, fires up his Web site, Daily Kos, and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way. And in this way the Kingpin has made himself a might force in his own mind and every knee shall bow.
On liberal blog MyDD today, Jerome Armstrong answers, sort of, the allegations first raised way back when in Suellentrop’s piece.
Let me just state for the record that any payola allegations or some quid pro quo deal involving Markos and myself are complete fabrications. Perhaps they are obsessed because they represent a party that has shown it’s complete inability to govern in this country, and they recognize that a people-powered movement is happening in this country that is going to oust them into the bin of history.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:13 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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