While in Park City for the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, my partners and I from the Guerrilla News Network met with the recently unemployed Vice President of the United States in the alpine chalet of his business partner Joel Hyatt. We had been summoned by Al Gore to pitch ideas for his planned, then still mysterious, television network.
We proposed a global newscast centered around a team of young, hungry videojournalists on a mission to cover the world’s most urgent and under-reported stories – free from corporate influence or celebrity drivel. Gore and Hyatt seemed impressed, at least enough to invite to stick around for lunch.
Over pizza, the conversation turned to the still raw 2000 election debacle. When one of us asked how it felt to have been so close, Gore let out a mock shriek – like a baby whose rattle had been taken away. It was a shockingly funny, all-too-human response. But he quickly turned serious, and began laying out the case for what he felt was extraordinary bias in television news. On election night, Gore explained, Bush’s cousin was in the control room at Fox News talking on the phone to the candidate and his brother Jeb throughout the night. Even more insidious, Gore noted, was the fact that outspoken Republican Jack Welch, then CEO of NBC’s parent company GE, was in the network’s election HQ, hovering over NBC’s chief election analyst Dr. Sheldon Gawiser. According to an investigation by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA.), witnesses at NBC reported that immediately after Fox became the first network to call the election for Bush, Welch "was observed standing behind Dr. Gawiser with a hand on his shoulder, asking why NBC was not also calling the election for Bush.”
The Welch anecdote, it seemed, was a signal.
We drove down the mountain that day confident, with or without our involvement, a serious, hard-hitting counter to the corporate news monopoly was being crafted in that swanky mountain pad.
Alas, it appears not to have been the case. Despite early rumors, Gore and Hyatt weren’t starting a news channel at all. Current, which launched at the stroke of midnight Monday morning, is a participatory (mostly) apolitical youth-targeted short documentary network. The network’s programming is produced almost exclusively by “citizen journalists” who upload their short “pods” to the network’s web site for consideration on air.
In this era of the blog, it’s obviously a catchy idea. The newborn network’s first hours on the air featured:
- Exhilarating video from a guy who parachutes off bridges- A deeply sad look at suicide in Japan
- The eye-opening story of a young woman who became an egg donor
- A risky trip to an Ecstasy party in Tehran
- A hard-hitting look at police brutality at the FTAA protests in Miami
While the channel started to feel vaguely like MTV’s “Made” or “True Life” series at times, and the hosts like they escaped from an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, it was an intriguing kick-off. I’m looking forward to watching more “pods” from young people about what they think is important, not some jaded 50-year-old network producer.
But I’m not the only one who finds Current’s short-form, scatter-brained format a major letdown.
We live in a time of unprecedented global crisis. Nearly one billion people on Earth live on one dollar a day. Each day, 40,000 children die of hunger or hunger-related diseases. The ice caps are melting. Over the last 50 years, nearly 50% of the oceans species have disappeared. The oil is running out and we haven’t come close to figuring out what to do about it. The U.S. is fighting a multi-front war around the world. Yet few Americans seem overly worried about any of it, thanks in large part to a news media that devotes hour after hour to missing blondes, celebrity hijinks, and partisan bickering.
If we start with the basic premise, as Bill Moyers told May’s National Conference on Media Reform, that “free and responsible government by popular consent just can’t exist without an informed public,” then it’s a legitimate question whether we actually have a democracy in the U.S.
We’re the most powerful nation in the history of the world, yet we have a population staggeringly ignorant about the most basic facts about the world around them. As tanks rolled into Baghdad, a majority of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.
Is it the news media’s fault? Can a network made up entirely random shorts submitted by amateurs stem the tide? Is that even the point?
I have no idea of the answers to any of these questions.
Young people chronicling their trials, travels and tribulations is, on balance, an appealing alternative to the idiotic, packaged “reality” the networks offer up daily. But considering the serious issues we face as a nation and a planet, I hope that the kids spend less time videotaping rappers who dress like donuts (as the 3rd place video submission on the Current web site does) and more time investigating corporate overlords like Jack Welch who jerry-rig our democracy to serve their bottom-lines.
Note: A veteran Canadian news producer named Paul Jay is trying to launch his alternative to Fox News. It’s called Independent World Television. Jay (who my partners at GNN have also met with) wants to create the world’s first non-commercial, non-government funded news channel. It has promise. But the plan isn’t without its own issues. He has raised only a small fraction of the $25 million he thinks he needs to get on the air, and the operation seems overly populated with the usual suspects from the academic left. Could it Jay be the next Ted Turner? Check out the channel’s trailer for yourselfhere.