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04:52:31 02/19/06
Video: Government Bypasses Press
[LESS INFO] 6 VIEWS | ADDED 04:52:31 02/19/06
Video essay in response to Jay Rosen's "Dick Cheney Did Not Make a Mistake By Not Telling the Press He Shot a Guy" bog post -- featuring Chris Nolan, Mindy Finn, Hugh Hewitt, John H. Brown, Don Beck, Steve Rubel, Merrill Brown, Tom Rosenstiel, Congressman Rob Simmons, and a virtual Jay Rosen.
You can listen to the full entire audio for some of the interviews -- and read the full transcript for the others.
Subscribe to this feed for future videos .
Subscribe to this feed to download all audio interviews posted so far.
Music: On The Moon (Trip Hop mix) by disharmonic
Here's a Windows Media version.
Full Transcript and Further thoughts are down below...
>
KENT BYE: The fact that Dick Cheney decided to inform the local newspaper instead of going through the national press when he accidentally shot a man -- this indicates that there's a fundamental shift in the power dynamic between the press and the government.
Now NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen says that, "Cheney took the opportunity to show the White House press corps that it is not the natural conduit to the nation-at-large; and it has no special place in the information chain."
This is a trend that Chris Nolan first observed during the 2004 election
CHRIS NOLAN (Spot-on.com): The idea that you can talk directly to voters past big media was a big, big part of the Republican campaign this past year. I think that that's a very little noticed and a very little appreciated fact. They treated the media as another constituent group like the tobacco lobby or whatever.
MINDY FINN (Republican National Committee, Deputy eCampaign Director): Where our opportunities are -- are through talk radio and through the Internet. And we found that was our best means for communicating our message -- to kind of cut through the mainstream media filter. And also, that there are so many cable channels now that those stations don't have the reach that they used to. And certainly the major networks don't have the reach that they used to.
CHRIS NOLAN (Spot-on.com): To a large extent, people bought it. And the people that were the most upset -- the people who complained the loudest were the big media people, and nobody really took up their cause. So I'd say that's a sign that something's changed in a big way.
KENT BYE: Something has changed -- The mainstream media is seen as less relevant, and politicians are more powerful.
HUGH HEWITT (Talk Radio Host & Blogger): What the blogosphere and the Internet have done to the Mainstream Media is just what Luther did to Rome, which was to -- not only to go around the gates, but to shatter them. There are no more gates. Now it's just a question of "What's true?" and "What's objective?" -- not what is an elite's understanding of the former.
KENT BYE: What's True and What's Objective is still a really big open question in our society. And I think it's going to come from some combination of traditional journalism, but also blogging -- and even collaborative media which is what I'm working on.
So let's take a look at this issue from the perspective of a politician.
CONGRESSMAN ROB SIMMONS (R-CT): If you look at the American media, and how it covers politics -- you basically interview a politician, take -- if it's TV -- take one or two sound bites, and build a story around that sound bite. If you look at radio, you allow that same political figure 15 or 20 minutes perhaps on a radio show -- a call-in to explain their position on a certain issue. If you look at the print media, depending on the nature of the interview, the journalist will take some quotes and build a story around it. But it's all based pretty much on what that one individual is saying, and then on how those words are interpreted by the journalist.
KENT BYE: So talk radio and new media provide politicians an opportunity to talk at length without having to be
filtered through the lens of an objective news story.
Well, that's great for them, but what about the public interest?
Who's going to be holding the politicians accountable when the only organizations they're going to be talking to are going to be those who are sympathetic to their message.
Steve Rubel talks about the dynamic between public relations and journalism.
STEVE RUBEL (MicroPersuasion.com): The public interest is important, but I think that that's more important to a journalist than it is to the PR professional. PR professional is less concerned with public interest, and more concerned with doing results that are going to get paid for. And where the journalists and the folks in this room where I stand here, they're definitely worrying about the public interest. And ultimately, they're going to decide what's best for the public, not us.
KENT BYE: But now that the politicians can completely bypass the journalists, they're free to focus on their own self-interest, which is mainly to preserve their political power. This has created a very polarized political culture, which is then amplified by the mainstream media.
DON BECK (National Values Center): The Mainstream Media is simple a reflection of the mainstream value structures in a society, particularly in our political class, which is obviously is the "Win at any costs" and be reelected, using often "Us versus Them" polarity -- "From the Left / From the Right," "Conservative/ Liberal" to divide people in like Blue States and Red States, and so forth. So when one looks at the problems in a society, obviously the dominant media will convey those codes, and when it looks like many of those behaviors tend to make things worse.
MERRILL BROWN (Media Consultant): What this country needs, from my point of view, in addition to a skeptical, hard-working news media, is a political system in which members of party in power feel free and have the political courage to stand up and speak up when things aren't going well in their parties. And this applies to both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats who were unwilling to speak up about the failures of the Clintons -- the Clintons in particular, and the administration more generally. Same thing is true now. There's a lot of Republican -- members of the Republican leadership who realize how inept this administration has handled some number of issues, and yet the political dissent and the dialogue from those people in places of power in the Republican party doesn't happen.
KENT BYE: Without this internal dissent, our political system has turned into an all-out cultural war where short-term political gains for either the Democrats or the Republicans is more important than anything else.
JOHN H. BROWN (State Department Employee who Resigned to Protest Iraq War): These are people who think in narrow, political, day-to-day terms -- who are absolutely parochial in their thinking. What’s important is "Winning The Game", and the game is American Politics.
KENT BYE: We have a political culture where winning trumps compromise, where debate trumps dialogue, where polarization trumps consensus.
STEVE RUBEL (Micropersusasion.com) The political environment for PR is much more about spin & influence, and the message of the day, and "How do you get it out?" It's very reactive. It's trying to take what's already coming at you -- and issues -- and then making sure that you shape your position on it.
ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE: On the Federal Level, the war between government and press is one of unequal firepower. The government spends nearly half a billion dollars a year, and employs thousands of people in Public Relations, Public Information, Public Image Making, and Public Obfuscation. In the Executive Branch, all of them -- all of those people, all of that torrent of information, all of those Xerox machines -- can be controlled by the White House. A President's personal power to dominate the news is beyond measure.
TOM ROSENSTIEL (Committee for Concerned Journalists): They understand our tendencies better than we understand them ourselves. They understand our weaknesses better than we understand them ourselves.
KENT BYE: So the media is being manipulated by politicians who understand how the media work better than they do themselves.
Jay Rosen agrees by saying that the White House "correctly guessed that if it changed the game on you, you wouldn’t develop a new game of your own, or be able to react... They sensed that the old press system was weakened." And that essentially, "they knew you wouldn’t react because to do so would look 'too political.”"
So politicians currently have an upper hand over the media as far as setting the terms of the discourse for the country.
So where do we go from here?
I think collaborative media actually has a lot of potential in this area, and that's what I'm working on here at The Echo Chamber Project.
But the question is, "Can new media put the power back into the hands of citizens?"
MERRILL BROWN : So I don't think there's going to be fundamental political change any time soon. But I do think -- as in all things -- we go through cycles. And we're in a cycle today where the political discourse is of a certain kind. And I think we're moving -- and will move very quickly between now and the next Presidential election to have a much broader discussion about our national sensibility, our national priorities, the nature of political discourse, dissent and dialogue. And I think media, the blogosphere, and the democratization of thought in this country has a lot to offer in that regard.
THEORY OF THE COLLABORATIVE MEDIA SOLUTION
I believe that collaborative media that is able to mediate the relative truths and falsehoods within the many different perspectives has the potential to overcome the anomalies within the existing journalistic paradigm.
What I've done is to interview as broad and diverse range of experts talking about a particular issue (i.e. pre-war performance of the media), and then my intention is to have an even broader and more diverse range of participants participate in adding context and meaning to this gathered knowledge
Facts and information do not become knowledge for individual citizens until they have put within a personalized context. The intention behind the use of the information will determine how it is processed and applied, and there have been many innovations over the last couple of years that are able to make these contexts more explicit on an individual level while also yielding significant network effects of social behavior.
This is specifically achieved through mechanisms of folksonomy tags, comment threads, allowing users to dynamically remix audio and video into playlists, allowing people to listen to the entire interviews as podcasts, as well as allowing the reuse of the material through liberal Creative Commons-licensing.
So the three practical steps for journalism would be: >
* Collect interviews from experts on issues that are of importance
* Parse the information into granular sound bites.
* Publish these sound bites online in a way that they can be easily sequenced and recontextualized into larger meanings.
This is what I've been building with this collaborative filmmaking infrastructure , and all of the puzzle pieces now exist -- but they still need to be put together.
So I've gathered 86 interviews up to this point , and I have quite a body of sound bites from knowledgeable experts -- You can download the 40+ interviews that I've posted already with this feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/EchoChamberProjectInterviewAudio
I hope that this video comment can demonstrate the capacity for creating a system that allows other people to easily juxtapose streams of facts and sound bites together to achieve a larger meaning.
3 Views
17:30:12 08/19/05
Echo Chamber Project Vlog Episode 2: Media & Politics
[LESS INFO] 3 VIEWS | ADDED 17:30:12 08/19/05
Here is the second Echo Chamber Project video blog entry
Description: Technology is transforming media & politics, and large-scale collaborative media can provide some insights into grassroots leadership and bottom-up democracy.
Featuring: Chris Nolan , Jeff Jarvis , Doc Searls , Scott Heiferman , Markos Moulitsas , Mindy Finn & Kent Bye.
(5:08 minutes / 12.6 MB)
Download Quicktime
Subscribe: Vlog RSS / Blog RSS
Listed below is a full transcript of this video with additional links...
BIG NEWS! >
[ UPDATE: November 2, 2005 ] The Rasiej campaign was never able to provide the necessary footage for this proposed remix. More details here.
This video blog episode will be one of the first citizen videojournalism reports to be remixed by a political campaign. This could provide a viable model for how traditionally top-down driven political campaigns could release some control over their communications strategy, and facilitate collaboration with citizens and issue-based advocates for talking about the niche concerns of constituents.
Vlogger and citizen journalist Ryanne Hodson will be gathering sound bites from Andrew Rasiej's campaign for Public Advocate in New York City, and then remixing them with sound bites from this Echo Chamber Project vlog episode in order to create a message that is unique to their campaign.
Both entries discuss how technology is changing media and politics, and how the Internet could faciliate a true grassroots, bottom-up democracy like we've never seen before.
Here is the pitch that I sent to the Rasiej campaign in order to open source the National aspects of their local campaign.
I framed the potential vlog remix as a way to "catalyze and energize a National-to-Local, peer-to-peer communications strategy" by having bloggers to tell NYC Democrats to know for Rasiej on September 13th.
In other words, since the Rasiej campaign has been so focused on the local Get Out the Vote efforts, then they didn't have time to connect the dots for what Rasiej's vision means for grassroots democracy and how political parties could use technology in new and innovative ways. Since I had already made this argument in this vlog entry, then I suggested that we collaborate on getting this message out there by open sourcing his national campaign strategy.
New York City also has a lot of political and cultural power, and if Rasiej is elected and his vision for Universal municipal Wi-Fi is implemented, then could set a trend for other cities to follow.
Rasiej founded the Personal Democracy Forum, which advocates for using technology to manifest a more grassroots democracy. This also happens to be where I gathered these interviews.
Here is a link to Rasiej's remixed video blog entry ( Remix Still in Production ).
It's nice to have the opportunity to put some of this theory into action for what is possible with using citizen journalism as a way to "open source" political campaigns. It is also opening more doors and paving the road for more doing collaborative media.
The Echo Chamber Project has more plans for how to take this idea to the next level by creating the tools to make large-scale collaborative media possible.
I am still searching for potential funders and computer programmers, so please leave a comment below if you're interested in getting more involved. Screen Capture Transcript Kent Bye ( EchoChamberProject.com ): I wanted to talk a bit about the intersection between media and politics for a couple of reasons. Collaborative media can provide a lot insights into grassroots activism and bottom-up democracy. The Echo Chamber Project is also developing a lot of the open source tools for collaborative media that could also be used for political campaigns in the next election cycle. So here are some insights from the Personal Democracy Forum.
[Intro Music Cue from Telekinetic Soulmate "Searching" courtesy of Defective Records] Chris Nolan ( "Politics from Left to Right" Blog): Back five / ten years ago, the people at Wired Magazine used to say, "The Internet changes everything." They were right. We're just getting -- I mean, outside of Silicon Valley -- people are just beginning to understand just how dramatic and how important those changes are. Jeff Jarvis ( BuzzMachine.com ): If you give the people control of media, they will take it. If you don't give them control, you will loose them. And I think we have to look not just at media where this is occurring, but also in marketing and in politics. I don't think here at the Personal Democracy Forum we've yet seen nearly the endgame of the people taking over their political process, and I do believe that will happen. Doc Searls ( Doc Searls Weblog ): Sooner or later, the connected electorate essentially imposes Democracy back on government in a way we've never seen before. So I think five years from now what we're going to see is something that's much more like democracy than we've seen in the history of the Republic. Kent Bye: It's safe to assume that the Internet will continue to change the way that we interact with media and politics. One of the founders of Meetup.com talks about the challenges of coordinating large-scale collaboration. Scott Heiferman (Co-Founder/CEO Meetup.com ): How do organizations find that balance between top-down and bottom-up? How is that you can both give people direction and leadership while at the same time giving people enough freedom to truly have a grassroots feel? Not just look grassroots, but authentically be grassroots. Not just sort of look bottom-up, but authentically be bottom-up. Markos Moulitsas ( DailyKos.com ): Now people want you to be proactive. They want you to be innovative. They want you to really look for solutions to problems. They don't want you to just follow orders. Yet we have a media environment and a political environment that are still very top-bottom driven. They still expect to issue proclamations and edicts and have people follow those. It's not like that any more. And I think that what we're seeing with the blogs is a creation of this new citizen's movement to take over things -- like I said -- politics, journalism and activism. Mindy Finn ( Republican National Committee eCampaign ): We're really tasked with online strategy. Leveraging the web and new media to help advance the committee's goals at all levels. For finance goals, which is raising money. To mobilization -- our political goals, getting grassroots out there, getting folks to the polls and actually voting for our candidates. And message, which is getting our message out there and hoping that it resonates, and helping drive the message into the grassroots and to the public. Markos Moulitsas: But I hope that what we're creating is culture where people don't feel a need to wait for "so-called leaders" to tell them to act to do anything. It's that they'll take that initiative on their own -- the tools are available. Mindy Finn: There's some hierarchy to respect. And I think there always -- I think there always will be and there always has been just to make sure that it's efficient and organized. But that what that hierarchy is all about is really putting people in touch with like-minded individuals -- empowering the grassroots. I mean, you have to have someone kind of crafting message. You have someone making sure that message is getting out to these individuals. Kent Bye: I think it's important to find that balance between top-down leadership and bottom-up participation without being too extreme on either end. What I hope to do with my open source documentary is help find that healthy balance. What I've done is I've gone out and taken the initiative to gather all of these interviews -- and ask the questions. But I'm releasing a lot of control with how the final film comes together. So I hope to have a community help collaborative edit and shape the film. So here's Doc Searls talking more about open source communities work. Doc Searls: Groups of people that work together in much the same way as -- say as a group of farmers would raise a barn. Right? And there's a shared understanding of what needs to be done. People step forward who have particular expertise, and they'll work on that part of the project. Kent Bye: Large-scale collaborative media can provide a lot of answers to some of the questions surrounding grassroots activism and bottom-up democracy. Small-scale collaboration is already possible with blogs, podcasts and video blogs -- but additional tools -- like the ones that I described in the previous episode -- have to be developed in order to facilitate collaboration on a large-scale. I'm still searching for funders and potential [software] programmers. So if you're interested in getting more involved, then please drop by the website and leave a comment.
4 Views
20:39:00 07/27/05
Echo Chamber Project Vlog Episode 1: Introduction
[LESS INFO] 4 VIEWS | ADDED 20:39:00 07/27/05
Introducing the first Echo Chamber Project video blog entry & vlog !
Description: First vlog episode about an open source, investigative documentary on how the television news became an uncritical echo chamber to the countdown towards war in Iraq -- and proposed tools for collaborative journalism that can provide some solutions.
Featuring: Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jonathan Landay, Pamela Hess, Bill Plante, Halley Suitt, Marilyn Schlitz, Kent Bye and 60 others.
To Watch the Video click here -- or on the picture below -- or try here if that link doesn't work. Check back in 10-15 minutes if neither work, the Internet Archive has been a bit spotty.
Sit back, relax and enjoy the show!
(6:15 minutes / 15 MB)
Download QuickTime
Listed below is >
* A full transcript of this video with additional links
* How to keep informed with the project ( Vlog RSS / Blog RSS )
* How to get more involved
* Click here & scroll to the bottom to leave feedback or other comments.
SUBSCRIBING TO THIS VIDEO BLOG
If you enjoyed this video, then you can have future Echo Chamber Project videos automatically delivered to you with this RSS feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/EchoChamberProjectVlog
Just copy & paste the URL above into iTunes' "Advanced" > "Subscribe to Podcast..." window. For more details, watch Andrew Baron's instructional video on Subscribing to Rocketboom's feed with iTunes.
Or here's another program that allows you to automatically download videos by using RSS subscription feeds -- FireANT (includes instructional video). >
UPDATE: The feed should work in FireANT now. It was having troubles, but I modified some Drupal code to make it work. More details here.
GETTING MORE INVOLVED
Three things you can do to get more involved with this project: >
* Sign up as a user to this website in the left-hand column to receive periodic e-mail updates and join the community.
* This page http://www.echochamberproject.com/tag/volunteer will aggregate the latest things you can do to get involved.
* You can make a financial donation to help fund the development of the open source tools to facilitate collaborative media by contributing to this PayPal account.
TRANSCRIPT Picture Transcript Echo Chamber Project Title Sequence [Photo Credit: chamomile remixed by Jen Gouvea & Kent Bye] Kent Bye ( MetaThought Productions ): My name is Kent Bye, and I'm a documentary filmmaker Kent Bye: Can you hear me?
Jen Gouvea: [Offscreen] Yep. Kent Bye: I've got this film, and a lot it's criticizing -- about the media, but I didn't just want to -- just like have this big rant about "The media is really screwed up" -- Everyone knows the media is screwed up. I'm trying to do something about. I'm trying to like find some viable alternatives. Jay Rosen (New York University / PressThink ): The world is not going to be the same for the major media in five or ten years -- That much I'm convinced of. [ Full Interview ] Kent Bye: This isn't too bright or anything? You see, that's what I'm thinking. It might not -- like -- Dan Gillmor ( Grassroots Media, Inc. ): The traditional mass media are a lecture. And we're evolving media into something in between a conversation and a seminar with some lecture as well. Doc Searls ( Doc Searls Weblog ): You know, the conversational mode of relating to each other is as old as humanity, but it's actually new to what we call "Media." Kent Bye: This project takes a look at how the ABC, CBS and NBC newscasts became an "Echo Chamber" to the countdown towards war in Iraq. And how I produce the film will provide some collaborative alternatives that can make media more inclusive of different perspectives and points of view. Jonathan Landay ( Knight Ridder National Security Correspondent ) And it was a failure of most major media to delve behind -- in a meaningful way -- the administration’s rationale for going to war -- the intelligence that it was using to make it’s case. [ Full Interview ] Pamela Hess ( United Press International Pentagon Correspondent ): I don’t think I ever doubted that there was going to be a war. There was a lot of talk about how "No decision has been made." But -- I don't -- Maybe we’re just too cynical, but all of the entire press corps at the Pentagon was just kind of looking at our watches and wondering when it was going to be. There was never any doubt, I think, in any of our minds that it was an "if." Tom Brokaw ( NBC Nightly News ): Target: Iraq Peter Jennings ( ABC World News Tonight ): The Road to Possible War Dan Rather ( CBS Evening News ): Showdown with Saddam Bill Plante ( CBS News White House Correspondent ): But if you take it as a given, as I've already suggested to you that we did, that the administration was hell-bent on going to war, then you could only point out the steps that were being taken down that path. [ Full Interview ] Kent Bye: [Screaming] Halley Suitt ( Halley's Comment Blog ): People want to know how things feel. I don't know why it's driving it in that direction, but I know that it is going that direction. Dr. Marilyn Schlitz ( "Consciousness & Healing" ): You cannot separate out what happens inside of us -- our belief systems, our worldviews -- from the nature of the world in which we're embedded. And this is true for journalism. It's true for medicine. It's true for science. It's true for every domain of human inquiry -- where we know that as thinking, feeling human beings we're much more complicated than just the biological, mechanistic aspects of our being. Kent Bye: I'm trying to do collaborative media that's scalable and profitable for big organizations to do it. Kent Bye: Why not just get all of the information out there? I can open source all of the text of the interviews. I could release the audio at some point with podcasts. And eventually, when the film is done, I could release the video so that people could remix it in whatever way they wanted to. They could add more conservative voices, or more progressive voices, or whatever voices they want to. Collaboration Dan Gillmor: In think in general. on any beat at any publication or broadcast, the readers by definition know more than any individual reporter Kent Bye: So collectively, my audience knows more than I do. And there are technologies that can tap into the wisdom of this crowd. Websites like del.icio.us or Technorati use something called "Folksonomy Tags" to add context and meaning to webpages. Kent Bye: Folksonomies could also be used to add context and meaning to film sound bites in order to facilitate collaborative editing. Doc Searls: Right now we're in a model where lots and lots of people are capable of inventing exactly what they want to do what they want, and then sharing it. Kent Bye: My website is running the open source community software called "Drupal." This allows the creation of specific tools to facilitate collaborative media. These tools can then be shared with any other website that's running Drupal or CivicSpace. Halley Suitt: I think a blogger's mantra could be, "Whatever else you do, bring intelligence to the network and share it. Make the network more intelligent." Kent Bye: So we went out and interviewed the following journalists, media critics and other scholars about the performance of the mainstream media leading up to the war in Iraq. These are the interviews that volunteers have been helping me transcribe so that I could post them on my website. [Photo Credit: Sam Holden ] Interviewees :
Journalists : Bill Plante , Jonathan Landay , Warren Strobel , Julian Borger , Helen Thomas , Greg Mitchell , John R. MacArthur, Pamela Hess, Amy Goodman, Jim Lobe , Verna Avery Brown, Robert Dreyfuss, Jack Nelson, Lawrence Grossman, Tom Rosenstiel
Media Critics : Steve Rendall, Cliff Kincaid, Danny Schechter , Andrew Tyndall
Journalism Professors : Susan Moeller, Todd Gitlin, Jay Rosen
Think Tank Scholars : Michael O'Hanlon , Grover Norquist, Cliff May , David Sirota , John Prados, Joyce Battle, Thomas Donnelly
International Law : Ruth Wedgwood, Phyllis Bennis, James Paul, Sean Murphy
Retired Government Analysts : Greg Thielmann , Ray McGovern, John H. Brown , Karen Kwiatkowski
Other Experts : Reed Brody , Nathalie Loiseau , Damu Smith, Afaf Stevens, Christopher Queen , Sulak Sivaraksa , Gola Wolf Richards Kent Bye: So I interviewed all of these people about where media is at, but what about the future of the media? What about all of these New Media technologies? New Media Interviewees
Markos Moulitsas, Jeff Jarvis, Hugh Hewitt, Dan Gillmor, Chris Nolan, Halley Suitt, Rebecca MacKinnon, Doc Searls, Mindy Finn, Sheldon Rampton, Christopher Rabb, Scott Heiferman, Hossein Derakhashan Kent Bye: How can you make a media that is more integral and holistic? Media & Consciousness Interviewees
Don Beck, James O’Dea, Marilyn Schlitz, Dean Radin, Fred Alan Wolf, Lynne Twist, Susan Davis, Peter Russell, Duane Elgin, Sharif Abdullah, Van Jones Kent Bye: You know, this media revolution is just starting to begin. And I look forward to hearing your insights for how we can make a better media. www.echochamberproject.com
Music Credit: Telekinetic Soulmate "Searching" courtesy of Defective Records -- Thanks buMp
