Hail to the Press

[stewstewstewdio.livejournal.com]

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.Thomas Jefferson

Yes. I know this video by filmmaker Jason Russell has been discussed before. However, it was done in the context of the Invisible Children’s Fund only. An American is exploiting an unfortunate situation for his own financial and personal gain once again. There are no surprises there.

What still hasn’t been discussed is the content of the video and what it hopes to achieve. This video is ½ hour long and can get tedious to watch. I have watched it so you don’t have to. I will summarize it under the spoiler.

In a nutshell:

• It starts by exhibiting the power of social media
• Jason Russell dotes over his son
• Jason Russell explains his film making background and his trip to Uganda
• He chronicles the trials and tribulations of Jacob, his Ugandan friend, and the Ugandan people
• He then talks about the atrocities of Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army
• He promotes a call to action to arrest Kony and bring him to trial before the world court
• He takes credit for having 100 military advisers deployed to Uganda by our government
• He hawks his action kit and bracelet. He also calls on celebrities to participate.
• He designates April 1 as the day to litter the world with posters and leaflets
• He sets an expiration date of the end of 2012 to complete this mission

Even if the cause he solicits is legit, it is a plan of action for finding your lost pet, not for bringing revenge justice to an international criminal. The numbers and enthusiasm of Jason Russell's followers is frightening. What is even more frightening is that this video is being presented as news and not the empty infomercial that it is. It is even being considered for an Academy Award.

Joseph Kony has passed his prime on the world stage. He has had his Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame and is reputed to be in the Congo with a force of a couple hundred instead of the 30,000 that is implied in the video. I was happy to see the New York Times bring it into perspective.

This is a massive oversimplification of a difficult problem. The proposal smacks of the First Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia in 1993. Something like this illustrates the complexity of a military intervention in a nation dominated by a weak government and rampant human rights violations imbedded in its culture.

What's more, the message ignores lessons we should have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. After the myth of weapons of mass destruction was debunked in Iraq, the justification for military action was to bring Saddam Hussein to justice. Also, the premise for Afghanistan was to bring Osama bin Laden to justice as well. After the passing of 10 years, the death of thousands of American troops and a couple trillion dollars later we have learned the true cost of these missions.

For all the outrage that is directed toward the American media and the mainstream media in particular, at least there is a code of conduct that tempers it. With all the claptrap about left leaning and right leaning bias in media, it beats the living crap out of the douchebaggery that is presented in this video. I know I have the option to go to BBC or al Jezeera for an alternate view of the news, but as news goes, I can respect that the American press can rise above this trash.

I can only hope that the KONY2012 type videos don’t become the standard lens through which we view our world.

Comments

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Yes, to me this only strengthens the need for freedom of the press. Yes this video is out there, but so are it's critics. This allows one to make up their own mind over the information they're receiving and this is why different opinions must be allowed to exist in the media.

As for myself, I'm skeptical that attacking one man is going to solve all the problems in Uganda, I feel like we truly do not know what's going on over there and need more information before we can even think of doing the things proposed in the video.

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

"The numbers and enthusiasm of Jason Russell's followers is frightening. What is even more frightening is that this video is being presented as news and not the empty infomercial that it is. It is even being considered for an Academy Award."

That doesn't surprise me at all. Why should it? Look at how "documentaries" like Al Gore's high-school PowerPoint masterpiece An Inconvenient Truth, Michael Moore's series of polemical little screeds, James O'Keefe's staged "exposés," Brietbart's treatment of Shirley Sherrod, things like Gasland are treated: as if they were unvarnished, objective, fact-based informational pieces, instead of what they actually are, pure opinion pieces, often with suspect research and shoddy methodology. Far too many people treat them with the same level of respect due to real journalism. This doesn't even begin to address the masses of credulous idiots who slavishly follow Rush Limbaugh and other opinion shows and treat their pronouncements as established fact. Heck, I dare say more of my classmates watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report than actually read the newspaper. What "news" people do follow seems these days to be mostly useless entertainment gossip and sports.

It's not as if the mainstream media were perfect, or perfectly objective, but this "entertainment as news" and "commentary as news" business seems to have replaced actual "news" for many people. Russel is merely the latest example. Serious journalism is going the way of the telegraph and the typewriter.

[sealwhiskers.livejournal.com]

An Inconvenient Truth was peer reviewed by a bunch of climate scientists which the Associated Press contacted and documented after the film release. They all approved the science discussed in it. But hey, Glenn Beck and a libertarian think tank "scientist" refuted it, so let's by all means compare it to O'keefe, Moore and Breitbart.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that looked really out of place...

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

"Peer reviewed" does not necessarily mean "objective," though, here or anywhere else. I even agree with the message of the film (I am no global warming skeptic), but like everything else Al Gore seems to do, it mixed credible scientific evidence and reasonable speculation with incredible hyperbole and end of the world scare tactics, which unfortunately casts doubt on the whole enterprise for me.

All the work of the serious climate scientists ends up for naught in trying to convince their opponents of the seriousness of the issue, when the likes of Mr. "Mansion With the Electric Bill of the Century" and "Flies Across the Atlantic on a Private Jet Then Takes a Limo Rather Than Walking A Couple Blocks to a Film Festival" Al Gore, Paul Ehrlich, Robert Corell, and others who sensationalize the issues into alarmism and apocalyptic fear-mongering.

[stewstewstewdio.livejournal.com]

Serious journalism is going the way of the telegraph and the typewriter.

My point of the post exactly. If this continues to become a popular alternative to the news, our entire perspective on the world may become nothing more than a collection of internet memes.

[sealwhiskers.livejournal.com]

So?
This has already happened. The Cony filmlet is merely proof of something that has been out there for a while. Some people believe without peer review and have always done so. Today there are peer review sources in much higher abundance than ever before in society and you get upset because "normal" people want to try to affect other normal people.

In the 1800's and a large chunk of the 1900's journalists *decided* the truth and not many could oppose what the head publishers of a big newspaper decided to be in print and what angle the head editor came down on. People were much more powerless then, and a large amount of them believed exactly what was put out there and had small means of doing anything to widen the view.
This is nothing compared to that, but historically there is very little outrage about hundreds of years of bullshit.
I think this phenomena is positive. Not the film in any sense, but the phenomena that it can be done.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

As opposed to the origins of modern newsprint in the age of Hearst, Pulitzer, and their European contemporaries who were all explicit partisans who didn't even pretend for objectivity?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

So then journalism's returning to its roots of the Pulitzer and Hearst age? The Old America didn't bother with journalistic objectivity, it was partisan and proud of it.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Russell has done something fairly remarkable -- gotten almost 90 million views of a 30 minute long piece on Youtube. Assume only a fraction of those watch the entire thing and that's still millions, maybe tens of millions, actually sitting still on the internet for a piece of content that isn't a pirated HBO show. In internet years, that's like grabbing them for the entirety of Wagner's Ring Cycle.

And they generally leave poorly informed about what is really going on in Uganda and with Kony today. What a powerfully wasted opportunity to do something useful.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

This. I'm even less interested in Kony and more interested in the situation in Uganda in general. Why should Kony get all the publicity when there are victims of human suffering out there that may need help?

[telemann.livejournal.com]

In internet years, that's like grabbing them for the entirety of Wagner's Ring Cycle.

LOL. Opera reference for the win!

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

I love this new spoiler thing. For once LJ does something cool. But I've no doubt they'll screw it up in no time. ;-)

[stewstewstewdio.livejournal.com]

I love this new spoiler thing

I just noticed it yesterday. The really nice thing about it is, once you have read the original OP, you can just basically keep it compressed throughout its whole comment life unless there is something you specifically want to reference in the OP.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Much better than the LJ Cut. Hadn't seen it in action yet.

[oportet.livejournal.com]

He's ended up having more critics than Kony.

Was it a poor plan, with poor execution, with little chance of changing anything? Sure, but can't the same can be said for governments blindly airdropping supplies and anyone texting $10 donations to random organizations with catchy commercials?

He's wasteful with money, and he likes to get drunk and masturbate in public, so he's automatically off the list of people who can attempt to do good? I'll remember that the next time I'm asked to make a donation or sign a petition...

[stewstewstewdio.livejournal.com]

Was it a poor plan, with poor execution, with little chance of changing anything? Sure, but can't the same can be said for governments blindly airdropping supplies and anyone texting $10 donations to random organizations with catchy commercials?

The difference between this and the call for donations is that this is a call for military intervention, which is far and away more dangerous than supply drops.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

"get drunk and masturbate in public"

Uh. wha? *googles* Well, damn.

[weswilson]

I spoke out against this video from moment one, asking people to do more research and read up on the actual situation.

That being said, this video shows no more douchebaggery than the gamut of right-wing demagoguery we see from the drones of Breitbart, Beck, Hannity, or Boortz. Oversimplification to support ideological viewpoint? Check! Lack of sufficient subtlety to accurately inform the viewer? Check! Denialist attitude towards the complexity of issues? Check! At least the Kony video was a call to action against a legitimate fiend, rather than the arbitrary tar-and-feathering of those whose opinions vary only slightly from your own.

On a scale of 1-10 for "Things that matter", the Kony video scores about a 2. We should rightly fear those whose call to action is far more sinister.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

People want easy answers.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

42

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

The Christian Science Monitor published an article (http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2012/0319/Backlash-against-Kony-2012-Where-are-the-voices-of-Ugandans) describing a screening of the film in Uganda. The screening had to be cut short due to a negative reaction by the audience. There was significant resentment about the arrogance of the film maker.

It is unfortunate that Jason Russell suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of stress over the negative publicity that his film generated. I hope he does not get suckered into a pill bottle addiction.

[stewstewstewdio.livejournal.com]

I hope he does not get suckered into a pill bottle addiction.

If he does, he can always become Rush Limbaugh's sidekick

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately this is typical of most so-called humanitarian ventures of this kind. Fortunately the information age managed to expose this one before it's done too much damage so people who would keep an eye out for scams like this would not fall prey to it.

[stewstewstewdio.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately this is typical of most so-called humanitarian ventures of this kind.

Yeah, but this one wants to use political influence and guns. Also, I won't be satisfied this over with until April 1 has come and gone, the number of views stops rising and we get our 100 military advisers out of Uganda.