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Media Studies

TVTV: VIDEO REVOLUTIONARIES

Director: Paul Goldsmith

Featuring Bill Murray, Hunter Thompson, Steven Spielberg, Lynn Swan, Goldie Hawn, Abbie Hoffman, Lily Tomlin and more, "TVTV: Video Revolutionaries" is a documentary about Top Value Television (TVTV), a band of merry video makers who, from 1972 to 1977, took the then brand-new portable video camera and went out to document the world. In those days, there were only three TV networks, using giant studio cameras, and no one had ever seen a portable camera stuck in their face, let alone one held by what Newsweek called "braless, blue-jeaned video freaks." Because the technology was so new, there were no rules about how to use it or what to make. So the "freaks" used it to make format-bending satirical shows about whatever interested them - from the 1972 Republican Convention to an award-winning expose of a 15-year-old jet-set guru named Guru Maharaj Ji, called "Lord of the Universe" to capturing the Steelers and Cowboys partying hard the night before Super Bowl X.

Directed by TVTV alum Paul Goldsmith, the film is like opening a treasure chest into the 1970s, filled with cultural and political events hosted by now-famous characters who were then just beginning their climb to iconic.

DVD / 2018 / 82 minutes

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ACORN AND THE FIRESTORM

Director: Reuben Atlas, Sam Pollard

If you were impoverished and politically voiceless, ACORN hoped to change your mind. For 40 years, the community-organizing group sought to empower marginalized communities. Its critics, though, believed ACORN exemplified everything wrong with liberal ideals.

Fueled by a YouTube video made by two young conservatives who posed as pimp and prostitute in a sting, ACORN's very existence would be challenged. ACORN and the Firestorm goes beyond the 24-hour news cycle and cuts to the heart of the great political divide.

DVD / 2017 / 84 minutes

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CELLING YOUR SOUL

Directed by Joni Siani

An examination of our love/hate relationships with our digital devices from the first digitally socialized generation, and what we can do about it.

In one short decade, we have totally changed the way we interact with one another. The millennial generation, the first to be socialized in a digital world, is now feeling the unintended consequences.

CELLING YOUR SOUL is a powerful and informative examination of how our young people actually feel about connecting in the digital world and their love/hate relationship with technology. It provides empowering strategies for more fulfilling, balanced, and authentic human interaction within the digital landscape.

The film reveals the effects of "digital socialization" by taking viewers on a personal journey with a group of high school and college students who through a digital cleanse discover the power of authentic human connectivity, and that there is "No App" or piece of technology that can ever replace the benefits of human connection.

DVD / 2017 / (Grades 6-12, College, Adult) / 48 minutes

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GRAY STATE, A

Director: Erik Nelson

In 2010 David Crowley, an Iraq veteran, aspiring filmmaker and charismatic up-and-coming voice in fringe politics, began production on his film Gray State. Set in a dystopian near-future where civil liberties are trampled by an unrestrained federal government, the film's crowd-funded trailer was enthusiastically received by the burgeoning online community of libertarians, Tea Party activists and members of the nascent alt-right.

In January 2015, Crowley was found dead with his family in their suburban Minnesota home. Their shocking deaths quickly become a cause celebre for conspiracy theorists who speculate that Crowley was assassinated by a shadowy government concerned about a film and filmmaker that was getting too close to the truth about their aims.

A Gray State combs through Crowley's archive of 13,000 photographs, hundreds of hours of home video, and exhaustive behind-the-scenes footage of Crowley's work in progress to reveal what happens when a paranoid view of the government turns inward - blurring the lines of what is real and what people want to believe.

DVD / 2017 / 93 minutes

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ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE: TRUTH, DECEPTION, AND THE SPIRIT OF I.F. STONE

Director: Fred Peabody

Independent journalists like Amy Goodman, Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Matt Taibbi are changing the face of journalism, providing investigative, adversarial alternatives to mainstream, corporate news outlets. Our cameras follow as they expose government and corporate deception - just as the ground-breaking independent journalist I.F. Stone did decades ago.

DVD / 2016 / 91 minutes

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HOT TYPE: 150 YEARS OF THE NATION

Director: Barbara Kopple

Hot Type: 150 Years of The Nation is a vivid, inside look at America's oldest continuously published weekly magazine. Shot over three years in intimate, cinema verite style, the film captures the day-to-day pressures and challenges of publishing the progressive magazine as it follows reporters out into the field, the editors who shape their work, and the editor-in chief who tries to keep all of the plates spinning.

Writers are the heart and soul of the magazine, and the film follows them extensively. Sasha Abramsky travels to West Texas to report on the years-long drought that has gripped the region and the devastating economic impact on farmers and residents. John Nichols unpacks what's going on behind the effort to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Amy Wilentz visits the "temporary" tent camps of Haiti, three years after the earthquake, to shed light on the dire conditions and lackluster international response. And Dani McClain reports on the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina, and its dynamic leader Rev. William Barber, as they push back against an extreme right-wing takeover of the state legislature.

In all of the current-day reported stories, The Nation's incredible trove of archival articles - and roster of writers - acts as an historical touchstone and illuminates how the past continuously ripples through and shapes current events.

At a fascinating moment in American history - politically, socially and culturally - the media landscape is changing at breathtaking speed. The film charts the journey of The Nation - and the nation - evolving into the future, as it is guided by its remarkable past.

DVD / 2015 / 92 minutes

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PROJECT Z

Directed by Phillip Gara

An investigation into how war games, worst-case scenarios, complex systems, and networked media produce the very crises they seek to model, predict and report.

As the Cold War ends, a professor goes in search of an America without an enemy. Armed with a Hi8 video camera and inspired by the detective work of Walter Benjamin, he heads deep into the inner circles of the defense, entertainment and media industries, where he discovers a worst-case future being built from war games, video games, and language games.

Some thirty years later, a group of student filmmakers find the videotapes in a filing cabinet, along with a stack of old newspaper clippings, audio interviews and photographs. With the help of friends from the Global Media Project, the filmmaker produces an experimental documentary that goes back to the future, where they find the original maps for a new world order. An unexpected warning is found on the outermost edges of the maps: "Beware of Zombies!"

The result is PROJECT Z, a film that updates another warning, issued by President Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address, about the emergence of a "military-industrial complex" and the consequences should "public policy be captured by a scientific and technological elite".

Combining rare footage from inside the war machine with corrosive commentary by leading critics of global violence, injustice, and inequality, the film challenges the living to write their own future before the walking dead conjure the final global event.

DVD / 2015 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 74 minutes

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INREALLIFE

Director: Beeban Kidron

InRealLife asks what exactly is the internet and what is it doing to our children? Taking us on a journey from the bedrooms of teenagers to Silicon Valley, filmmaker Beeban Kidron suggests that rather than the promise of free and open connectivity, young people are increasingly ensnared in a commercial world. Beguiling and glittering on the outside, it can be alienating and addictive. Quietly building its case, Kidron's film asks if we can afford to stand by while our children, trapped in their 24/7 connectivity, are being outsourced to the net?

While newspapers alternately praise and panic about the glittering world of the Internet, there is a generation of children who have grown up with a smart phone in their hand, connected to the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Public discourse seems to revolve around privacy, an issue that embodies the fears and concerns of adults. What is less discussed is what it really means to always be online, never alone and increasingly bombarded by a world that has something to sell you and appears to know you better than yourself. A world that is so ubiquitous that it is the first thing you see as you wake up in the morning and the last thing you see before you go to sleep at night.

For adults there was a 'before' the net. But for the current generation, at the time of their most rapid development they have no other experience and few tools with which to negotiate the overwhelming parade of opportunity and cost that the internet delivers directly into their hands.

From the bedrooms of five disparate teenagers and then into the companies that profit from the internet, InRealLifetakes a closer look at some of the behavioral outcomes that come from living in a commercially driven, 'interruption' culture.

Following the physical journey of the internet, from fiber optic cables through sewers and under oceans, from London to NYC and finally to Silicon Valley, the film reveals that what is often thought of as an 'open, democratic and free' world is in fact dominated by a small group of powerful players. Meanwhile our kids - merely pawns in the game - are adapting to this new world - along with their expectation of friendship, their cognition and their sexuality.

DVD / 2013 / 90 minutes

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SMILING THROUGH THE APOCALYPSE

Director: Tom Hayes

Esquire magazine was a galvanizing force in American culture from the early 1960s through the early '70s. Forging its pop-cultural capital on the basis of provocative cover art, intellectual audacity and riveting articles by the preeminent and cutting edge writers of the time, the magazine captured the zeitgeist of America in the crucible of the '60s.

The chief architect of this print revolution was Harold Hayes, a brilliant and tenacious editor who granted Esquire's contributors unprecedented journalistic freedom. Hayes' fearless instincts provided a haven for writers like Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Nora Ephron, William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer, and nurtured the iconoclastic talents of art director George Lois. By making it possible for writers and artists to bring novelistic techniques into reportage Hayes fostered what became known as "New Journalism".

The indelible cultural contributions captured in this enthralling documentary by his son, Tom Hayes, provide a vivid context for nothing less than the rebirth of American aesthetics. Featuring interviews with Robert Benton, Candice Bergen, Peter Bogdanovich, Brock Brower, Graydon Carter, Lee Eisenberg, Harlan Ellison, Nora Ephron, Robert Frank, Hugh Hefner, Tom Meehan, Frank Rich, Bob Rifkind, Gay Talese, Gore Vidal, Ed Wilson, Tom Wolfe and many others.

DVD / 2013 / 99 minutes

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LOGIN 2 LIFE

By Daniel Moshel

Centered around two people homebound by their disabilities who have found community online, LOGIN 2 LIFE explores the growing number of people who spend much of their lives in online virtual worlds.

Elaborate digital platforms like Second Life and World of Warcraft offer novel opportunities for friendship, sex, employment, and aesthetic experience in virtual communities populated by cartoon-like avatars. While these simulated worlds are often treated with contempt by the general media, LOGIN 2 LIFE takes a more sympathetic approach, profiling seven people deeply immersed in these worlds, and attempting to understand what each gets from their virtual life.

Paralyzed from the neck down in a car accident, 27 year-old Corey spends most of his days playing World of Warcraft, exploring a virtual landscape with far greater ease than he can move through his physical one. Alice, 60, has limited mobility due to multiple sclerosis. In Second Life, she is able to draw on her skills as an educator and volunteer to run an in-game business that provides resources to other disabled people.

We also meet a diverse cast of characters from around the world, whose different online engagements illustrate the range of motivations for choosing a largely virtual existence. Kevin, a middle-aged family man in Florida, makes his living selling virtual sex devices within the Second Life universe. Philippe, in France, is an award-winning director of World of Warcraft machinima who has turned is hobby into a career. In China, a family of World of Warcraft "gold farmers" toil endlessly online, earning in-game currency that can be sold for real money.

LOGIN 2 LIFE reconsiders the demarcation usually drawn between physical and online worlds. The film asks us to consider whether the people we have met are exceptions, driven to digital immersion by particular needs, or if they are pioneers of a lifestyle that will soon become commonplace.

DVD (Color) / 2012 / 86 minutes

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SHADOWS OF LIBERTY

Directed by Jean-Philippe Tremblay

Uses shocking examples of cover-ups and censorship by the US media to show how a few mega corporations exercise control over the content of our news.

SHADOWS OF LIBERTY examines how the US media are controlled by a handful of corporations exercising extraordinary political, social, and economic power. Having always allowed broadcasting to be controlled by commercial interests, the loosening of media ownership regulations, that began under Reagan and continued under Clinton, has led to the current situation where five mega corporations control the vast majority of the media in the United States. These companies not only don't prioritize investigative journalism, but can and do clamp down on it when their interests are threatened.

The film begins with three journalists whose careers were destroyed because of the stories they broke: Roberta Baskin, whose scoop about Nike sweatshops didn't sit well with CBS when Nike became a co-sponsor of the Olympics; Kristina Borjesson, another CBS reporter, whose job lasted precisely one week after the network spiked her investigation into the TWA Flight 800 disaster in 1996; and Gary Webb, whose story linking US support for Nicaraguan Contras and the epidemic in crack cocaine was trashed by The New York Times and the Washington Post. (His story was true, but Webb lost his job and eventually killed himself.)

With the help of interviewees including Daniel Ellsburg, Dan Rather, Julian Assange, Chris Hedges, Dick Gregory, Robert McChesney, John Nichols and Amy Goodman, the film explores in depth the monopolies and vested interests that filter the dissemination of information thus damaging the democratic process. One notorious example, featured in the film, of the anti-democratic nexus between the military-industrial complex and the news media was the latter's unquestioning acceptance of the former's trumped up justification for the Iraq War.

With profits taking priority over the truth and the powerful being taken at their word rather than taken to task, the film asks whether the Internet can withstand corporate pressure and remain free, or will it too fall into the hands of monopolistic corporations.

Ultimately has our commercial world caused us to lose one of the most precious commodities of all--unbiased information?

DVD / 2012 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 93 minutes

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BATTLE FOR THE ARAB VIEWER, THE

By Nordin Lasfar

In early 2011, people around the world tuned into Al Jazeera to watch the Egyptian revolution in real time. Meanwhile, rival broadcaster Al Arabiya was also offering near continuous coverage, with cameras on a balcony overlooking the 6th October Bridge, where protesters and police clashed.

How was the content of those broadcasts - and the networks' subsequent coverage - influenced by their political allegiances?

Featuring interviews with current and former journalists from both networks, and analysis from independent pundits, The Battle for the Arab Viewer highlights the philosophical differences between the two pan-Arab networks.

Al Jazeera was created by the Emir of Qatar after he deposed his father in a coup. The station typically champions the poor and social movements - such as the Muslim Brotherhood - that are hostile to the Saudi regime. The station has grown highly influential. In the film, a passerby stops Al Jazeera's chief Cairo correspondent on the street to thank him and the government of Qatar for supporting the anti-Mubarak forces, saying the network is "90%" responsible for the revolution.

With Al Jazeera supporting elements hostile to Saudi Arabia, the Saudis set up their own network as a counterpoint: the more conservative Al Arabiya, owned by a close friend of the royal family.

While The Battle for the Arab Viewer offers insight and analysis, it also shows how the battle between the two networks plays out on the ground in Cairo. We go behind the scenes with Al Arabiya journalist Randa Abul Azm and Al Jazeera's Abdelfattah Fayed as they follow stories, break news, and cover events such as Hosni Mubarak's trial. (Azm is allowed into the courtroom, but Fayed is not.)

Azm and Fayed each mirror their networks' respective demographics. Al Arabiya appeals to well-off, middle-class viewers who value security and stability. Enter Amz, who lives in a building built by her engineer father, on a street named for her grandfather. Fayed, representing the network that purports to stand for the downtrodden, shows us a photo of his father, who worked in agriculture.

Both deny that their work is influenced by the political agendas of their networks' owners. But former employees of both networks tell a different story. Particularly striking is the case of Hafez al Mirazi, who was taken off Al Arabiya's airwaves after promising to put Saudi Arabia under the microscope on his show.

Media bias is nothing new - as Mirazi says, viewers of Fox News and MSNBC each know what they are going to get. What is different in the Arab world is that the networks are directly owned by states. He says, "They keep shifting according to the countries they are sponsored by, and that affects the stories their citizens get on a daily basis."

Ultimately, the problem may resolve itself. As democracy spreads through the region, will truly independent media follow?

DVD (Color) / 2011 / 48 minutes

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OUR NEWSPAPER

Directed by Eline Flipse

After journalist Andrey Schkolni leaves his job at The Leninist, the state-supported - and state-censored - regional paper in Uljanovsk, Russia, he and his wife, Marina, decide to start their own newspaper. The couple takes on local apathy, isolationism, criticism, and ridicule; they are determined to serve the local population, located over 550 miles from Moscow in a largely rural, often snowbound area. Week after week, everything from writing and researching the articles to designing the layout takes place in their small home. They even work to distribute the paper - which they name Our Newspaper - with their tiny family car.

Slowly Andrey's doggedly reported local news and Marina's horoscopes and home remedies begin to catch on. When Our Newspaper's circulation and size climbs to 7,000 weekly readers and eight pages, it begins to pose real competition to the four-page Leninist. Finally, the isolated population can read their own news: instead of "articles" about far-off cities, golden harvests, and unrealizable state projects, Our Newspaper reports on an impoverished village without running water for three months and profiles a courageous local doctor who makes house calls her bicycle despite freezing temperatures.

Andrey and Marina's light-hearted local news gathering quickly gathers gravity, however ... until it eventually puts its creators in danger. The issues facing the once prosperous but now economically depressed region are very serious. Despite his best efforts to protect himself and his wife, Andrey's reporting begins to implicate corrupt local corporations and political officials and raise thorny questions of journalistic and business ethics.

Juxtaposing small, personal stories against the background of contemporary Russian history, OUR NEWSPAPER creates a portrait of personal integrity and bravery under increasingly desperate circumstances. The award-winning Dutch director Eline Flipse (Broken Silence, Albanian Stories) paints subtle portraits of her film's powerful personalities with warmth, humor and complexity that will stay with you long after the film ends; it is an unforgettable illustration of modern Russia and the vital role of journalism in an emerging democracy.

DVD (Color) / 2011 / 58 minutes

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WAR YOU DON'T SEE, THE

Directed by John Pilger

John Pilger's powerful and timely investigation into the media's role in war.

John Pilger's new film is a powerful and timely investigation into the media's role in war. The War You Don't See traces the history of `embedded' and independent reporting from the carnage of World War I to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan. As weapons and propaganda are ever more sophisticated, the very nature of war has developed into an `electronic battlefield'. But who is the real enemy today?

DVD / 2010 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 96 minutes

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MADE OVER IN AMERICA

By Bernadette Wegenstein & Geoffrey Alan Rhodes

In the age of surgically enhanced beauty and reality television, how do we perceive body image? MADE OVER IN AMERICA combines the style of reality television with experimental film to weave together the voices of producers and consumers, surgeons and their patients, clinical psychologists, media theorists, and youth who are coming of age in a culture where bodies seem to be customizable. Together they form a picture of how the desire for a better self operates within consumer culture and how this desire is fed by media, the makeover industry and culture at large.

Among those in the film are Cindy, a San Diego housewife who felt ugly all her life until she was made over in the first season of FOX's show The Swan, a plastic surgery makeover show; The Swan producer Nely Galan, who says she invented the show to empower women; Cathy, a 21-year-old college student who dreams of carving her own belly into a six pack and her roommate's nose and bottom down to average size; Beverly Hills celebrity cosmetic surgeon and artist Dr. Randal Hayworth, who uses the metaphor of Michelangelo carving beauty from marble to describe his instinctual approach to surgery; and maxillo-facial surgeon and beauty expert Dr. Stephen Marquardt, who has become famous for analyzing beauty according to a mathematically proportionate grid to which all beautiful faces conform.

MADE OVER IN AMERICA includes archival material on child development, actual plastic surgery procedures, art video and collage montages showing popular imagery, combined with powerful stories of how far Americans will go to fit in, showing the power of media in shaping ideas of beauty.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2007 / 65 minutes

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MAGIC RADIO

By Stephanie Barbey & Luc Peter

In Niger, where more than 80% of the population is illiterate, radio is the main means of mass communication. Simple yet reliable, the radio is everywhere, in the streets, homes and the bush.

It entertains, educates, informs and helps provide a check on power. Today, through the radio waves, the citizens of Niger seize the microphone and taste democracy.

It's an FM revolution.

DVD (Color, With English Subtitles) / 2007 / 54 minutes

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PAPER, THE

Directed by Aaron Matthews

By chronicling for a year the publication of Penn State University's Daily Collegian - one of the nation's leading student newspapers, with a 200-person staff and a circulation rivaling that of many small-town newspapers - this documentary reveals the many challenges and issues with which young journalists must contend.

These range from ethical considerations, sensitizing reporters and editors to diversity issues, and dealing with circulation woes, to struggling for access to news sources and, above all, trying to determine whether they should be informing or entertaining their readers. Utilizing a cinema-verite style, THE PAPER follows the editors and reporters of The Daily Collegian through their everyday routines, sits in on editorial meetings, follows reporters as they cover stories, attends classroom sessions where new reporters are trained, and interviews staff members about their particular frustrations and disappointments.

Interweaving the drama of pressure-cooker journalism with the energy and idealism of young people, THE PAPER explores the media from the fresh perspective of tomorrow's journalists. But the young reporters' dilemmas and decisions raise complicated questions about the role of the press in society. Do you lure readers by entertaining them or offering hard news? How can the media deliver the news when obstructed by wary public officials and misleading public relations campaigns? What is the media's responsibility to serve the public interest in all its diversity?

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2007 / 78 minutes

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DEMOCRACY ON DEADLINE

By Calvin Skaggs

If, as the saying goes, information is power, then journalists can be seen as watchdogs of our government leaders and custodians of the public good, providing truthful information to help citizens build or preserve democratic societies. DEMOCRACY ON DEADLINE is a comprehensive look at journalists worldwide, working in different media and various languages, as they attempt to speak truth to power.

Filmed in the United States and countries throughout Africa, Asia, Central America, Europe and the Middle East, DEMOCRACY ON DEADLINE profiles international journalists as they cover local and international events, and in the process enables them to discuss their sense of vocation, the need to defend journalistic principles against commercial pressures, how they deal with censorship or government constraints, as well as dangerous and even life-threatening conditions.

Among the many journalists featured are those at Radio SKY in Sierra Leone as they cover an election in a country where more people listen to radio than read newspapers; Moscow journalists (including Anna Politkovskaya, assassinated in October 2006) who discuss government control of the media and covering the Chechen War; the publisher, editors and journalists at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz who explain why they feel it is important, especially for a readership too often concerned only with its own agony, to document the violence directed against Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank; and several U.S. journalists who discuss how the press failed in its reporting of the Bush Administration's misuse of intelligence on the lead-up to the Iraq War.

In an era when mainstream journalism, especially in the U.S., is being steadily eroded by political manipulation, commercial constraints, and circulation and ratings pressures, DEMOCRACY ON DEADLINE is an important reminder of the crucial political value of an independent news media in any democratic society.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2006 / 114 minutes

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INDEPENDENT INTERVENTION: BREAKING SILENCE

Focuses on the human cost of the Iraq War to contrast corporate-controlled media coverage with independent media.

Independent Intervention is an award-winning documentary about United States media coverage of the conflict in Iraq. Focusing on the human costs of war, it contrasts corporate-controlled media coverage of the invasion of Iraq with independent media reports of the brutal realities on the ground.

Through discussions with media experts including Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Dahr Jamail, Danny Schechter, David Barsamian, Kalle Lasn, Norman Solomon, and James Zogby, the film investigates important issues and systems that govern today's information flow, and shows how these systems of control reveal themselves during times of political turmoil and war.

Independent Intervention also includes commentary by Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, Bill Moyers, Michael Moore, and Jeremy Scahill.

DVD (Color) / 2006 / (Grades 9-12, College, Adult) / 75 minutes

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PLAYING THE NEWS

y Jeff Plunkett & Jigar Mehta

In November 2004, media from around the world covered the U.S.-led attack on the Iraqi "terrorist stronghold" of Fallujah. So did the video game, Kuma War, whose realistic simulation of the event was designed as an "intense, boots-on-the-ground experience" for video gamers. Young people don't watch TV news or read newspapers, explains Kuma Reality Games CEO Keith Halper, but they play hour after hour of video games, so why not convey war reports to them through their recreational activities?

PLAYING THE NEWS profiles the first video game company to consider itself a legitimate news organization, taking us from the company's Manhattan offices, equipped with satellite technology, to the frontlines of the war in Iraq. The documentary features interviews with Kuma executives and designers, a media studies professor, a New Technology writer for The Economist, a war correspondent, and several video gamers, who download new episodes monthly and who can play separately or link up online with others to play as a squad.

Can such video games play a serious journalistic role or do they misconstrue the real nature of war for voyeuristic thrills? Do they represent the future of journalism or the dangerous blurring of news and entertainment? Can we look forward to an Abu Ghraib video game?

PLAYING THE NEWS is a provocative examination of whether video games are a revolutionary new way to engage young people in current events or an unethical marketing gimmick that merely seeks to exploit war.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2005 / 20 minutes

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TALK MOGADISHU: MEDIA UNDER FIRE

The story of HornAfrik, the first community TV and radio station in Somalia.

A decade after the disastrous US humanitarian intervention in Somalia, HornAfrik, the first independent TV and radio station in war-ravaged Mogadishu, was established by three brave Somali- Canadians in the face of chaos and devastation. Their vision was to forge a path to peace through freedom of expression, impartial news, and debate. The station's talk shows have become incredibly popular, providing a unique way for Mogadishu's marginalized residents, including women's groups and human rights advocates, to speak out without being silenced.

It is a venture not without danger; HornAfrik has been attacked more than once by angry warlords displeased with the station's content. Despite the perils, the founders of HornAfrik continue their broadcasts, creating a blueprint for the role of the media in times of conflict.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2003 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 50 minutes

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TOP HAT AND TALES: HAROLD ROSS AND THE MAKING OF THE NEW YORKER

Director: Adam Van Doren

Narrated by Stanley Tucci, Top Hat and Tales chronicles the first 25 years of The New Yorker magazine, from its creation by Harold Ross in 1925 to his death in 1951. Interviews with current Editor-in-Chief David Remnick, former Cartoon Editor Lee Lorenz, and Senior Editor Roger Angell will inform about how The New Yorker's signature style and content were shaped by its early contributors, including E.B White, James Thurber, J.D Salinger, and more. Film clips from the '20s and '30s, home movies, and images from the anthology of The New Yorker covers and cartoons illustrate this historical case study of one of journalism's most revered publication. Writers, artists and academics including John Updike, Charles Schulz, Stuart Hemple and Roy Blount Jr offer interviews and insight into The New Yorker's role in American cultural history.

DVD / 2001 / 47 minutes

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TRIBE OF HIS OWN, A: THE JOURNALISM OF P. SAINATH

Indian journalist reminds us of the meaning of responsible journalism.

At a time when government propaganda and corporate spin are increasingly presented as fact, and a handful of corporations control the news, A TRIBE OF HIS OWN: THE JOURNALISM OF P. SAINATH reminds us what news media can be.

In India, nearly 400 million people live in poverty. Believing that responsible journalism can help to change things for the better, Palagummi Sainath wrote a series of 70 newspaper articles for The Times of India chronicling the living conditions in the ten poorest districts of the country. For two years Sainath lived in the communities he wrote about; he traveled across India, often on foot, in hill areas, drought-prone areas, and tribal areas to put the issue of poverty back on the national agenda.

After nearly a decade of work and dozens of awards, Sainath remains as passionately committed as ever. According to Sainath the shift from hard-hitting, truth-seeking journalism to innocuous, promotional stenography goes hand in hand with the increase of globalization. This, he believes, has also contributed to the 1990s becoming "the time of the most gross social inequality since the Second World War."

A TRIBE OF HIS OWN follows Sainath to the Indian villages he writes about and explores his contention that "journalism is for people, not shareholders."

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2001 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 50 minutes

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TELEVISION UNDER THE SWASTIKA

Director: Michael Kloft

Legend has it that the triumphal march of television began in the United States in the 1950s but in reality its origins hark back much further. Nazi leaders, determined to beat Great Britain and the U.S. to be the world's first television broadcaster, began Greater German Television in March 1935. German viewers enjoyed their TV broadcasts until September 1944, as Allied troops closed in.

Making use of 285 reels of film discovered in the catacombs of the Berlin Federal Film Archive, TV UNDER THE SWASTIKA is a fascinating look at the world's first television broadcast network. It explores both the technology behind this new medium, and the programming the Nazis chose to put on it. Interviews with high-ranking Nazis as well as "ordinary" people on the street, cooking shows, sporting events, cabaret acts and teleplays are some of the stunning finds seen here - all of it propaganda, but some of it quite entertaining.

A rare and intriguing look into the Third Reich, TV UNDER THE SWASTIKA is required viewing for anyone interested in the history of television, the intersection of media and propaganda, and the inside story of Nazi Germany.

DVD (With English Subtitles) / 1999 / 52 minutes

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