David Newhoff

Yesterday, I was listening to a discussion with Tom Brokaw broadcast on NPR from The Commonwealth Club.  Asked his opinion of news and information in the digital age, the veteran journalist said that he believes the variety of available content is generally a benefit to the world but that the consumer must “apply filters” to the information being delivered.  In other words, the onus is now on us to do the fact-checking we used to rely on relatively few news sources to do on our behalf; and Brokaw suggests the basic questions:  “What is the source? Who are the players?  What is the vested interest?”

We liberals are pretty clear about the manipulative puppet show that calls itself FOX News, but we are simultaneously less critical of information sources that at least appear to share our ideological views.  In general, even if the source is the New York Times or Forbes, we should pay attention to the reality that the non-stop, digital news frenzy results in a lot of self-made journalists sourcing one another.  On Salon.com, for example, Glenn Greenwald will use a word like documented that links to another article that itself provides no hard evidence for its position.  This phenomenon is literally viral, and I believe the educated, progressive class needs to be more critical of every story before feeding the disease, no matter what logo appears in the header.

Recently, a  well-educated, liberal friend of mine posted this piece from Reader Supported News, and it may well be one of the worst examples of insidious, hack journalism I’ve seen yet.  If all you read is the article, you will assume that Senator Franken voted against the National Defense Authorization Act, which is not true and can actually be documented.  The article, dated 12/17, is largely copied and pasted from a floor statement made by Franken prior to the vote (dated on the senator’s site 11/29); but Franken ultimately voted Yea for NDAA on 12/1, when the bill passed 93-7.

In addition to literally taking the senator’s words and post-dating them in order to obfuscate, somebody (we’ll never know who) wrote an introduction to the piece that begins “Yesterday, the Senate passed a bill…” thus creating the illusion that whatever date the news aggregator puts on this nonsense is, in fact, the day after a vote that is now almost a month old.

This same article, whatever its source, appears verbatim on Huffington Post and several other sites with less brand recognition.  Huff Post shows over 6,000 “Likes,” and nearly 3,000 shares — all by well-meaning, likely-liberal citizens who have literally been lied to about this story and simply assumed that it was true.

Citizen journalism can be a powerful tool, but only if those of us still clinging to rational thought in this crazy world are willing to double check before sharing.

12/2/11

It isn’t often that the needs of independent artists are aligned with those of men and women in the military; but, as someone who is directly concerned with both, I urge my colleagues in the creative community as well as military personnel and veterans’ organizations to support the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation in the House, and the PROTECT IP and Combating Counterfeits Acts currently being debated in the Senate. (Read More)

Let me say in the interest of full disclosure that my film gone Elvis has been blogged about by the organization Copyright Alliance, that I am one of CA’s members, and that I am on good terms with its director, Sandra Aistars.  Immediately, these facts will suggest to some that I am a shill for this lobbying organization that many believe is a “front” for giant media conglomerates and industry trade organizations like the MPAA.  But here’s the thing about fronts and shills:  they don’t disclose who they are or who they work for.

Every day, I confront someone on Facebook or Twitter copying a blog or news story with a sensational headline about the dangers of the Protect IP Act and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).  It’s the End of the Internet!  Protect Freedom of Speech!  Protect yourselves!  Don’t Let Congress Take Away Your Rights!  Many of these posts originate with organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and if you go to eff.org, the first thing you’ll discover is that it’s got a long list of staff members, many of them lawyers; and the last time I checked, lawyers like to get paid.  So, whose paying these lawyers?  You could click on the link to find its sponsoring members, but . . . they don’t have one.  Why not? Because, rather than transparency, EFF and organizations like them are actually tech-company funded lobbying and marketing organizations posing as civil libertarians.  If you download the annual report, you can see the kinds of companies that support EFF; and it’s important to recognize that tech companies, Google in particular, have a vested interest in turning a blind eye to online piracy.

It’s true that Copyright Alliance is backed by the  big media organizations and more. But why do you think CA is more transparent about its supporters compared to a site like EFF?  It’s worth mentioning, also, that CA’s membership includes about 8,000 independent artists making modest salaries, who also don’t want to get ripped off.  What protections would they, would I, have against piracy without the funding and lobbying muscle of the big content producers to lobby for more effective copyright protections? We operate in a dynamic landscape with billions to be made in piracy, either directly or indirectly; and independent content producers are literally wiped out by foreign-based, enterprise-scale, rogue sites that steal and distribute their content for free.

We’ve become so paranoid about the government and big corporations, that we miss the fact that  other big entities are cramming these anti-legislation messages down our throats.  Google is funding a great deal of the anti-legislation effort made to look like it’s coming from independent sources.  It’s reach is more pervasive and insidious than that of any Hollywood studio.  For all the benefits of YouTube, we shouldn’t forget that it was built from a start-up by getting away with copyright infringement for a few years.  If I ran a hugely successful furniture chain today that started out by robbing houses to sell stolen goods off a truck, would that seem so laudable?

I think people just read and re-post these articles based on the headlines.  We’re so conditioned to think of the government as bad and these so-called freedom-fighting blogs as “on our side,” that we just pass them along to our friends, who pass them along to their friends.   The irony is, of course, that it’s so often artists and entrepreneurs who propagate all this nonsense that could kill a law designed to protect their interests.  I also sense that those who share these headlines are left-leaning and fearful of a right-wing Congress hell-bent on curbing free speech, but these bills are heavily supported by both parties and the Obama administration.  They are good laws that protect content creators like me and my colleagues.

The bottom line is that both Protect IP and SOPA are narrowly written bills designed to go after foreign-based, enterprise-scale websites whose sole business is to profit from stolen, American-made media.  Both bills contain language that rejects any notion of a site being capriciously taken down solely for suspicion of piracy. 

Take a look at the details of these bills, or at least visit www.copyrightalliance.org, and learn about the issue for yourself before hitting the Like or the Share button.  There is nothing in these bills that threaten anything you hold dear.

Headless Horseman July 4, 2011 - Kinderhook, NY

You may rightly ask, what is Wasington Irving’s famous villain doing in a 4th of July parade?  The real answer is that the school master (Jesse Merwin c.1809) of  Kinderhook was supposedly the inspiration for Irving’s character Ichabod Crane.  As such, the horseman makes periodic, incongruous appearances around here other than Halloween.  Upon further reflection, though, I must ruefully admit that there could not be a more appropriate symbol for the worst in us Americans than a homicidal ghost without a head.  I’ve come to think of the horseman in our 4th of July parade as a cautionary specter, a reminder that as a society we tend to bang around headlessly quite often.

I’m certainly not the first to recognize the paradox that the “information age” has rendered citizens less informed than ever.   And there’s nothing politically discriminatory about rampant headlessness.  There seem to be about as many liberals propagating nonsense out there as conservatives.  While I lean toward solidarity with the folks occupying Wall Street right now, I am also fully aware that the majority of that crowd couldn’t tell you any more about how Wall Street works than a Tea Partier could tell you about, well, the “Boston Tea Party,” for example.

Obama’s getting pounced on by FOX News types for saying that “Americans have grown soft and lost their competitive edge…” They claim that he’s trying to shift the blame from himself to the public for the ongoing economic crisis; and FOX will no doubt rally its hard-working viewers into a frenzy by convincing them that the president just called them all “lazy.”  FOX is labeling it Obama’s “malaise” moment, referring to an address to the nation by President Carter on the flailing economy of the 1970s. The opportunity to compare Obama to Carter is too good to pass up because we all know Carter was such a bad president, don’t we?

Of course, one of the reasons people didn’t, and still don’t, like Carter is because he has a head.  In fact, Carter is worse than an intellectual; he’s been downright prophetic about some things; but that also means saying things that people don’t want to hear.  Remember Reagan laughingly tearing down Carter’s (admittedly symbolic) solar panels from the White House?  That was a wonderfully headless moment in American history.  Who knows where we’d be if we’d invested in renewable energy in 1978.  If you think Americans resent cold facts that don’t square with their biases of the moment, then anything tending toward prognostication will send them into an absolute headless tizzy.

Unfortunately, we’ve got nothing but prognostication at the moment.  The here-and-now is a disaster and will probably get worse; and there are no policies that will mitigate the disaster in the span of a single presidency.  As a result, the GOP are burnishing up a slate of some of the most headless individuals ever to grace the political stage; and the democratic base is angry and disappointed without any particular direction — again.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a very American tale, but one without any heroes.  Ichabod Crane is a cad and a freeloader; Abraham “Brom Bones” van Brunt is sort of an obnoxious jock; and Katrina is a scamp, who uses the cad’s affections to stoke the ardor of the jock.  It’s basically a high school horror story in which the horseman becomes a kind of dark angel of judgment, destroying a character more worthy of pity than empathy.   Perhaps it’s no accident that this phantom is a slain Hessian, symbolizing a revolution not yet won.