"Bring your own" - so we did!
There's a lot of video here on the 'Grok - a lot of it is YouTubed but a fair amount that is also on our own server because it is way too long. We are in favor of video as it gives a more complete experience of what interests / amuses us.
Thus, when I saw this, I just smiled and thought "hmm, we've been doing this for at least two years now....". Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit wrote a piece that talks to this as well based on the interviews of ABC's Charlie Gibson interviewing Governor Sarah Palin - there are a lot of complaints of editing that tried hard to put Palin in a bad light.
The "BlogFather" (and Doug and I) have a solution for this:
CHARLIE Gibson's ABC interview with Republican veep candidate Sarah Palin produced a lot of complaints from Palin fans. There's not much anyone in the campaign can do about journalists like Gibson misstating candidates' "exact words," but there is something that candidates - and anyone else interviewed by a possibly hostile media - can do to make sure that things get played straight in the editing process.
You just have to break the camera monopoly. Luckily, that's become easy.
And it is EXTREMELY easy! The great thing about the present Internet technology is that almost ANYONE can use a relatively common vidcam, there's software to transfer the WMA / JPG files onto a website, and most browsers pretty much know how to handle it when clicked.
This takes vid (and audio, btw) journalism out of the hands of well funded organizations with fancy dancy stuff and into the hands of ordinary schlubs like Doug and I, and you!
An episode of "The Simpsons" a few years back centered on Homer facing bogus sexual-harassment charges. A TV news show ("Rock Bottom") interviewed him and edited his innocuous statements to make them sound incriminating. (To make the joke clear, the hands on a clock in the background were in a different position for almost every word). Ultimately, Homer was saved only because Groundskeeper Willie turned out to have shot video that exonerated him.
Real life isn't "The Simpsons" (though politics are seeming more and more cartoonish these days). Still, TV is all about the editing - and even modest tweaks can drastically change how an interviewee comes across.
As what seems to have happend, once again, by the MSM to keep their narrative alive. Can you say, however, "boomarang" for the results it got them?
So, when you sit down for an interview (unless it's live), you're putting yourself, like Homer, at the mercy of the editors. Usually they're honest, but not always.
But there's a remedy now, with technology being what it is. If I were a candidate, I think I'd bring my own camera to interviews, shoot the whole thing and post the unedited raw video on the Web.
The technology for this is easy - I've got a little Sony HD video camera that records on a chip and fits in a coat pocket or purse - and putting video on the Web is a snap, too.
Of course, the knowledge that this will happen is likely to be enough to keep people honest - but if anything is edited unfairly, the full video will tell the tale. No need to wait for Groundskeeper Willie to appear.
TV journalists won't be happy with this, of course, but it's hard to see a principled basis for objecting.
Yeah, they are one of "those groups" that feel that they can hold other people accountable to what they believe to be right - but hate it when they are held to the same standards. After all, they are "Journalists".
In the past, the tools for broadcast newsgathering were expensive and specialized, and much of the media's power came from the fact that no one else had them. Those times are long gone, and candidates, and journalists, are going to have to adapt.
We've often said similiar things about politicians - the Internet is an unforgiving master - it never forgets. With the hegemony that is Google, aided and abetted by all the other search engines, what ever is now said will always stay said - and politicians can no longer operate by the old rules.
Some will never learn this - and fail. Some will - and will prosper
Of course, there are risks for candidates, too. A gaffe-prone candidate, or one who's just bad at speaking extemporaneously, might want to present only edited videos to the public - especially if he or she can count on the news media to be generally sympathetic.
Hmm, poor President Bush seems to be in dutch for these kinds of gaffes. But, I can think of two others that HAVE lately depended upon this help by the MSM (pop quiz - go ahead, name them!).
But that just makes the whole exercise more valuable to the public, as whether a candidate is willing to make the raw video available would provide a useful data point on whether the candidate is confident - and whether the press corps is in the tank.
I predict, however, that we'll see this strategy adopted soon, quite possibly in this election cycle. The news-media monopoly continues to decay, and technology continues to march on.
I'm surprised, very surprised, that politicians or anyone getting interviewed, haven't done this before. Like I said, if two ordinary schlubs in central NH figured this out a while ago, then....
We really got started with "video on blogsite" as a result of our political activities in our home town. Doug and I started our first year on our local Budget Committee and started to challenge the status quo. That year, the BudComm moved conservative and the "old boy network" were not happy campers.
Doug, having been appointed for that first year, ran for election after that session. To summarize, things got hot and heavy and people (Doug and I) were accused of much misbehavior (and they hated that we blogged about the meetings too - the Town tried to slap a Code of Ethics that would have, in a round about way, shut us down from that "free speech" activity (didn't help them much that I discovered that the document on which they "had spent a lot of hours on" was nothing more than a screen scrape from Sunnyvale, CA (next time, folks, remember to do a REPLACE ALL).
Doug ended up winning the election against his most heated opponent. But we learned a lesson - no, don't get it in writing - film it.
Doug brought his video camera and had someone man it. I bought a Logitech webcam (you know, the one on the stalk). We both taped the session. We posted the video.
The amazing thing is that neither Doug or I changed how we spoke or how we acted. It did, however, make things a lot more calmer from "the other side". I guess that they didn't want to be seen by anyone in town acting they way they had before when very few people showed up for the meetings.
