31 January 2008 @ 9:10AM >> The Indoctrinate U screening at Duke went quite well, and the group that organized the event has posted a reaction on their blog:

Last night’s screening of Indoctrinate U was fantastic! The film was insightful, provocative and often hilarious. The Duke Chronicle reported the event in today’s issue, though with a few significant mistakes and a somewhat unfortunate title. DSEDuke sponsored the film, with contributions from the Program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace and the Political Science department. A discussion afterwards was co-sponsored and promoted by the Duke Conservative Union, College Republicans, Duke Democrats, and the Center for Race Relations.

If any reviews of the Louisiana State screening become available online, I’ll post that link as well.

30 January 2008 @ 9:37AM >> Sometimes, I wonder:

A story based on the Three Little Pigs fairy tale has been turned down by a government agency’s awards panel as the subject matter could offend Muslims.

The digital book, re-telling the classic story, was rejected by judges who warned that “the use of pigs raises cultural issues”.

[...]

The CD-Rom digital version of the traditional story of the three little pigs, called Three Little Cowboy Builders, is aimed at primary school children.

[...]

The feedback from the judges explaining why they had rejected the CD-Rom highlighted that they “could not recommend this product to the Muslim community”.

They also warned that the story might “alienate parts of the workforce (building trade)”.

The judges criticised the stereotyping in the story of the unfortunate pigs: “Is it true that all builders are cowboys, builders get their work blown down, and builders are like pigs?”

[...]

Becta, the government funded agency responsible for technology in schools and colleges, says that it is standing by the judges’ verdict.

30 January 2008 @ 9:15AM >> “The international media hasn’t been reporting it prominently, so you may or may not know that rockets have been raining down on southern Israel regularly over the past few months — as many as fifty a day.”

25 January 2008 @ 9:17AM >> Good news! Next Tuesday’s screening of Indoctrinate U at Duke University is now open to the public.

Also, we’ve just announced a screening at Indiana University School of Law on February 25th.

Other upcoming screenings: Louisiana State University (Shreveport) on January 29th; San Diego State University on February 13th; and Ottawa, Ontario (Canada) on February 18th. Many more to come.

And finally, plans should be announced shortly for screenings at my alma mater—Bucknell University—and Washington & Lee.

Last time I visited Bucknell for a screening of my work, the school’s head of security threatened me with arrest—in front of the audience gathered to watch my film.

Hopefully things will go a little more smoothly this time.

25 January 2008 @ 4:53AM >> According to an upcoming 60 Minutes report, Saddam Hussein lied about weapons of mass destruction:

Saddam Hussein initially didn’t think the U.S. would invade Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, so he kept the fact that he had none a secret to prevent an Iranian invasion he believed could happen. The Iraqi dictator revealed this thinking to George Piro, the FBI agent assigned to interrogate him after his capture.

[...]

“He told me he initially miscalculated... President Bush’s intentions. He thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998...a four-day aerial attack,” says Piro. “He survived that one and he was willing to accept that type of attack.” “He didn’t believe the U.S. would invade?” asks Pelley, “No, not initially,” answers Piro.

[...]

Saddam still wouldn’t admit he had no weapons of mass destruction, even when it was obvious there would be military action against him because of the perception he did. Because, says Piro, “For him, it was critical that he was seen as still the strong, defiant Saddam. He thought that [faking having the weapons] would prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq,” he tells Pelley.

He also intended and had the wherewithal to restart the weapons program. “Saddam] still had the engineers. The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there,” says Piro. “He wanted to pursue all of WMD...to reconstitute his entire WMD program.” This included chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, Piro says.

By the time the war began, Saddam Hussein had already been subverting the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food program for years. U.N. bureaucrats and foreign officials around the globe were being paid by Saddam to look the other way as he used the Oil-for-Food program as his own personal slush fund in one of the biggest financial scams in human history.

In other words, the U.N.’s sanctions against Saddam were far worse than completely ineffective; they were helping Saddam’s regime.

Without war, sanctions would have eventually gone away, and the rest of the world would have been in the position of hoping that the Saddam Hussein was completely reformed and that his talk never turned into action.

Given Saddam’s history of filling mass graves, only a fool would stake their safety on that wishful thinking.

21 January 2008 @ 10:40AM >> According to the Associated Press, “less than 1 percent” of the population of Belarus is Muslim. Nevertheless, it appears that Sharia law has been instituted in the former Soviet republic:

A Belarus court sentenced a newspaper editor Friday to three years in prison for reprinting a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked worldwide riots when it was initially published in a Danish newspaper.

[...]

Security officers in Belarus launched an investigation of Sdvizhkov in February 2006 when he published the caricatures which had originally appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

Fiery protests swept across Muslim countries in early 2006 in reaction to the Danish publication.

President Alexander Lukashenko ordered the paper shut the following month, calling the publication of the cartoon “a provocation against the state.” Sdvizhkov was arrested and charged with “inciting religious hatred” in November 2007 when he returned to Belarus following several months of living in Russia and Ukraine.

The Minsk City Court imposed its sentence Friday after a closed-door trial.

As Glenn Reynolds notes, “if you don’t want your religion dissed, you might as well start blowing people up. Obviously, it works. Nice incentive structure, there.”

20 January 2008 @ 12:13PM >> Today’s quote of the day comes courtesy of the pastor at Senator Barack Obama’s church:

Some argue that blacks should vote for Clinton because her husband was good to us. That’s not true. He did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky.Rev. Jeremiah Wright
Trinity United Church of Christ

Now, in the interest of fairness, I should balance that critique of America’s First Black President with a few words in support of his wife:

16 January 2008 @ 9:12AM >> We’ve just posted details for two more campus screenings of Indoctrinate U: one at Louisiana State University (Shreveport) and another at San Diego State University. For more information, visit the Indoctrinate U screenings page.

15 January 2008 @ 8:55AM >> In response to the post Court Closes the “Michael Moore Loophole”?, Terry Howard writes:

Was reading your most recent post about campaign finance reform and how it relates to private citizens generating “issue oriented” content. This is such a slippery slope, on all sides, that I think the judges and congress should be more worried about than us as private citizens. These guys are still thinking about content distribution and ad placement in terms of quaint methods they can wrap their heads around. How do they plan to apply such decisions to web distribution? What about hybrids like CurrentTV? What about YouTube on your TV via AppleTV? Do people have to give equal time on their blogs and social networks? Podcasts? RSS feeds? Twitter?

Further, as an internet marketer I am really curious to see how they ever plan on extending their reach into the numerous platforms of ad distribution: paid search, organic search, banners, email, pay for post, mobile marketing, embedded ads in video, viral marketing, guerrilla marketing, flash mobs... I could go on for hours, and that’s the point. Are these guys who think of the internet in terms of tubes really ready to delve into that world? They are ill equipped to wade into the pool beyond radio, TV and print, and quite frankly, two of those three are all but off the table for most promotional purposes and TV is quickly becoming unattractive as other methods offer vastly superior ROI. They are making bad decisions that won’t even apply to reality by the time they finally pass anything legislatively.

You can’t control political speech and advertising with today’s technology any more than you can lasso the moon. Whether it should be done or not becomes a moot point then.

I agree that political speech will be harder to regulate as media becomes more fractured and decentralized. But I wish I thought that meant politicians and bureaucrats wouldn’t try. If anything, the seeming chaos of the cacophony of individual voices in online media will probably lead some people to start arguing for tighter controls on political speech.

So as long as speech regulations are pitched as something else—such as campaign finance reform—it ends up getting supported by people who don’t pay much attention to politics but casually believe campaign finance needs reforming. And unfortunately, people have a tendency to care a lot less about free speech when it isn’t theirs being stifled.

It is interesting that, by and large, the editorial pages of the nation’s newspapers supported the McCain/Feingold political speech limitation bill. The fact that the legislation limited the speech of other private citizens—and not newspaper editorial writers—probably didn’t hurt. After all, in a world with less political speech, the power of a newspaper editorial writer is enhanced. Faced with a media environment where more people are getting news online and from independent voices, a cynic might say that newspapers saw campaign finance reform as the McCain/Feingold Endangered Editorialists’ Protection Act.

Being embedded in an old-media business, the ink-and-paper columnists might not have seen the regulations as a direct threat to their speech. But that’s only because they’re confusing their product—words and images—with the physical carrier of their product.

By encouraging the government to regulate political speech differently based on the employment status of the speaker and the medium in which the speech is conveyed, myopic editorialists have guaranteed that busybody bureaucrats will eventually try to tie down whatever medium those newspaperites flee to once the last inch of their sinking paper ship is finally dragged beneath the surface.

Whether they be political activists or not, if private citizens, like the folks who formed Citizens United, do not have the right band together to engage in political speech during certain times of the year, then the First Amendment is just a part-time right afforded to only part of the citizenry.

14 January 2008 @ 8:26AM >> The Economist reports on the music industry’s woes:

In public, of course, music executives continued to talk a good game: recovery was just around the corner, they argued, and digital downloads would rescue the music business. But the results from 2007 confirm what EMI’s focus group showed: that the record industry’s main product, the CD, which in 2006 accounted for over 80% of total global sales, is rapidly fading away. In America, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the volume of physical albums sold dropped by 19% in 2007 from the year before-faster than anyone had expected. For the first half of 2007, sales of music on CD and other physical formats fell by 6% in Britain, by 9% in Japan, France and Spain, by 12% in Italy, 14% in Australia and 21% in Canada. (Sales were flat in Germany.) Paid digital downloads grew rapidly, but did not begin to make up for the loss of revenue from CDs. More worryingly for the industry, the growth of digital downloads appears to be slowing.

“In 2007 it became clear that the recorded-music industry is contracting and that it will be a very different beast from what it was in the 20th century,” says Mark Mulligan, an analyst at JupiterResearch. Last year several big-name artists bypassed the record labels altogether. Madonna left Warner Music to strike a deal with Live Nation, a concert promoter, and the Eagles distributed a bestselling album in America without any help from a record label. Radiohead, a British band, deserted EMI to release an album over the internet. These were isolated, unusual deals, by artists whose careers had already brought years of profits to the big music companies. But they made the labels look irrelevant and will no doubt prompt other artists to think about leaving them too.

The prime function of a record label is to scout, identify and promote talent. Distribution is obviously key to the business, but it’s largely a function of logistics and technology, and it’s tangential to the consumer’s interest in the product.

Talent identification and promotion is the real business value as far as consumers are concerned, simply because there are lots of people producing music, most of which probably wouldn’t appeal to any given person. So the role of record labels—first as a filter selecting talent, then as a megaphone promoting it—is a useful function. But this role doesn’t necessarily have to fulfilled by labels. Friends who share your musical tastes might do it, for example. But in order for your friends to turn you on to some good music, they have to be introduced to it somehow.

Social networking sites online amplify the ability of individuals to act as filters and as promoters of what they like. People list their favorite bands on sites like Myspace, and their friends can click over to the band’s profile and often listen to a few tracks for free. More people can be exposed to more music through their friends on Myspace than in real-life casual conversation, so an increasing portion of the role played by record labels is now be handled by individuals, online.

Market changes might force labels to become smaller, but the same technology that’s destroying their current business model will also let labels do more with less. If individuals are taking on more of the role of promoter, any promotion done by record labels will be amplified in a way that didn’t happen in the past. Special-interest niches can be targeted like never before, and the amateur music enthusiasts with influential online presences can be identified and courted by labels seeking to tout the next great act.

Record labels won’t disappear altogether, because there will always be a role for professional filters. Talent needs to be scouted, and promotion will always be helpful in connecting people to new music. But the balance of power in the music industry is shifting, seismically. Labels will be smaller, but they have the potential to be sleeker. And if this gives artists an opportunity to keep more of the revenue their work generates, that won’t be a bad thing.

13 January 2008 @ 12:20PM >> I got to know David French in producing Indoctrinate U. When I interviewed David, he was the head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a non-partisan group that fights for the free speech and free thought rights of students and professors.

Recently, I got an update on David through a mutual friend, who pointed me to this, written by David’s wife Nancy:

I knew when my husband David French [...] watched the towers fall on 9/11 on his law firm’s television, he wanted to do something. Four years later, he did, by resigning from his role in the civil liberties arena and joining the Army Reserves. In 2007, he left the comfort of his home and family and went to Forward Operating Base Caldwell in Iraq where he serves as the Squadron Judge Advocate for Sabre (2d) Squadron, 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment.

At Camp Caldwell, he has joined over a thousand soldiers who share less than a dozen phones and computers, making it impossible to stay in touch with family and friends back home.

David feels strongly about this form of service. And we made this decision as a family. David’s deployment has certainly challenged our family’s life. But we’ve been able to remain somewhat connected by sending him care packages. And many of our friends sent David care packages just as soon as we knew his mailing address.

However, David noticed many of the young soldiers receive nothing. Some have dysfunctional or almost no family support back home. Others come from very low income backgrounds where the families cannot afford to send many items.

To address this need, David and Nancy were involved in starting Operation Send-a-box:

Operation Send-a-Box aspires to send two care packages to every soldier in the Sabre squadron by the end of February—ambitious since there are over a thousand soldiers serving in this strategic location. The squadron’s chaplain has agreed to distribute packages to soldiers who have not yet received mail from home, beginning with the lowest ranked soldiers.

12 January 2008 @ 9:35PM >> On the night of Tuesday, January 29th, the Indoctrinate U campus tour will kick off with a screening at Duke University.

Other screenings at additional schools will be announced in the coming weeks. The Screenings page on the Indoctrinate U website will always have the latest information.

---

I’m also happy to announce the first Canadian screening of Indoctrinate U! The screening will be held on February 18th at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, Ontario.

Hopefully the film won’t cause anyone from the screening’s sponsor to be dragged before Canada’s increasingly-powerful thought police, the Human Rights Commissions. But with the right complainant, I guess it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

12 January 2008 @ 12:21PM >> Matt Walliser writes in to say:

In your January 2 article titled “From Rainbows to Downloads” you suggest (emphasis mine)

when songs are stored as data and can be moved around like any other computer file, consumers will only ever need to buy one copy. As long as open formats are used, people will be able to play their music on any device devised in the future.

In February 2006 I wrote to you in regards to iTunes reaching 1 Billion downloads, loosely predicting that the music industry’s reluctance to evolve would only serve to strengthen Apple’s dominant position in the marketplace (or something like that). Recent anti-trust lawsuits filed against Apple with respect to monopolization of format simultaneously reinforce both your point (above) and mine. For clarification’s sake: I’m neither condemning nor condoning the actions Apple has taken that have brought about the lawsuit (predatory pricing of their hardware being the most credible, imho), I’m merely calling it like I see it.

Even though the music business has been fighting the trend towards Apple’s online distribution dominance since at least 2005, ironically, one reason Apple has so much power today is because of bad decisions made by the music labels themselves.

For years, labels have demanded that digital music be burdened with copy protection technology. In order to get permission to sell music through the iTunes Music Store, labels required Apple to implement copy protection, which they did. That technology, called FairPlay, is one of the less onerous copy protection schemes out there, but it does mean that music files purchased through the iTunes Music Store can’t be played by non-Apple devices (although they can be burned onto standard CDs, which can then be used in any standard CD player). In other words, the labels’ insistence on copy protection ended up giving Apple the ability to lock customers into its file formats, thereby making it more difficult for those customers to switch to devices sold by Apple’s competitors.

Steve Jobs has called on the recording industry to abandon copy protection, and after one label granted permission, Apple now sells some songs in MP3 format without copy protection. Competitors like Amazon are now selling music in unprotected MP3 format as well. Maybe the recording industry is slowly waking up.

Still, I can’t help thinking that Steve Jobs is secretly smiling to himself, knowing that the long-running short-sightedness of the music business is part of the reason that Apple enjoys such dominance in online music distribution. If music labels had allowed sales of unprotected MP3s right from the start, Apple’s iPod would probably be just as dominant in the market for portable music players, but the iTunes Music Store would likely be a different story.

10 January 2008 @ 6:37PM >> A few years back, I interviewed Michael Moore and asked him if Fahrenheit 9/11 should be considered a political advertisement, and if so, whether campaign finance laws should apply. Moore admitted the film contained his opinions, but that his film should be treated like an op-ed in the paper.

During the 2004 election, neither ads for the Bush-bashing Fahrenheit 9/11, nor the film itself were regulated under campaign finance laws.

But now that there’s a new film about Hillary Clinton, all of a sudden, campaign finance laws do apply to political perspective films:

The early reviews are in, and three federal judges appeared in agreement Wednesday that a movie lambasting Hillary Clinton seemed an awful lot like a 90-minute campaign advertisement.

Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group, is challenging the nation’s campaign finance laws, which require disclaimers on political advertisements and restrict when they can be broadcast. The group argues “Hillary: The Movie” and related television advertisements are not political advertising even though the New York senator is in the presidential race.

Attorney James Bopp argued that they should be considered “issue-oriented” speech because viewers aren’t urged to vote for or against the Democrat.

[...]

The movie is scheduled for two screenings in theaters, once each in California and Washington. It is also being sold on DVD. Neither of those methods are regulated under campaign laws. The advertisements, however, are scheduled to run during the peak presidential primary season and would be regulated.

Bopp, who successfully led a challenge to one aspect of the campaign finance system last year, compared the film to television news programs “Frontline,” “Nova,” and “60 Minutes.” That prompted Lamberth to laugh out loud from the bench.

“You can’t compare this to ‘60 Minutes,’” the judge said. “Did you read this transcript?”

The movie features commentary from conservative pundits, some of whom specifically say Clinton is not fit to be the nation’s commander in chief.

The content of the film is irrelevant; if the film merely expresses opinions, it is protected constitutional speech. And if it is factually inaccurate in a way that is defamatory to Hillary Clinton, she has legal recourse for that.

It shouldn’t matter whether a film is made by a Hollywood insider like Michael Moore or an issue-based outfit like Citizens United. Groups like Citizens United—on the right and the left—are formed by private citizens with a common goal of promoting their shared ideas. The speech of Citizens United should not be more regulated than the speech of any of its individual members—or any other private citizen for that matter.

All filmmakers—in fact, all citizens who value their free speech rights—should be concerned about this decision. Michael Moore should be concerned. Because even though he has the benefit of Hollywood’s infrastructure and support (and therefore has no need to become involved with an organization like Citizens United), his films are financed and distributed by corporations that may one day find themselves subject to the same regulations now being imposed on Citizens United.

Any attempt to regulate political speech is direct assault on the First Amendment.

4 January 2008 @ 9:28AM >> Matthew Sheffield of NewsBusters busts the New York Times:

The quickest way to get the liberal media to pay attention to you is to claim to be a Republican who hates Republicans. It’s an almost infallible public relations strategy that of late has worked well for "Republican" Monica Green.

It’s also done wonders for "lifelong Republican" Henry A. Lowenstein, who has managed to get 20 different letters published in the New York Times since 2003, a remarkable feat when you consider that the Times (by its own admission) receives around 1,000 letters a day and prints only 15 on its letters page. That means the odds of the average liberal person (the paper freely admits it favors left-wing letter writers) getting his or her letter printed are about 1.5 percent.

It’s worse when you think of the numbers on a yearly scale. In the past five years, the Times has received approximately 1.8 million letters. It’s printed 20 of Lowenstein’s.

With a look at Lowenstein’s e-mails (and the political contributions of a New Yorker with the same name), Sheffield makes a convincing case that the Times has been duped. Perhaps willingly?

2 January 2008 @ 8:57AM >> Two of my favorite creative minds in music—Thom Yorke and David Byrne—recently sat down to discuss the future of the music business. Last October, Yorke’s band Radiohead released its latest album, In Rainbows. But rather than releasing it through a traditional music label, Radiohead let fans download the music directly from its website. And rather than charging a fixed amount for the album, users were given the option of naming their own price—down to and including zero.

The sinking fortunes of the music industry establishment may have been instigated by technological change, but they are worsened by the industry’s unwillingness to let consumers buy music that isn’t locked to specific formats or media. It’s like peering into the future of the movie industry.

In both cases, you have industries whose fortunes have been protected for decades by the commingling of content and medium. Record albums weren’t just vinyl, they were vinyl with embedded music: the music couldn’t exist without the physical medium. As tapes replaced records and CDs replaced tapes, higher fidelity and increased convenience of each new format gave consumers a reason to re-purchase content that they already paid for in lesser formats. But when songs are stored as data and can be moved around like any other computer file, consumers will only ever need to buy one copy. As long as open formats are used, people will be able to play their music on any device devised in the future. There goes the upgrade gravy train.

Like the music industry, the film industry is rightfully concerned with piracy, because once music and movies aren’t tied to a physical medium, they can be copied endlessly. But consumers don’t care if this inconveniences the industry; people have shown that they want the convenience of digital content, and they are willing to pay for it. So the more that record companies lock down digital content in order to fight piracy, the less incentive legitimate customers have to buy the product in the first place. What good is the “music as a file” model if it is artificially burdened with the same limitations as physical media?

The movie business hasn’t been hurt by the shift away from physical media yet. But that’s only because technology hasn’t advanced far enough. It takes a lot more data to store a high-definition movie than an album’s worth of high-fidelity music. When a typical consumer’s Internet connection becomes fast enough to download high-definition full-length movies in a matter of minutes, the home market for movies will be subject to same technological dynamics affecting the music business today. And that future is only years away.

But that isn’t the film industry’s biggest problem right now. After all, people won’t pirate content that they don’t want to watch in the first place.

The problem with the film business is that too many insiders forgot that the rest of America doesn’t necessarily share the same view of the world as their friends in Hollywood. Instead, Hollywood has become its own echo chamber, which is why distributors keep pushing out flop after flop of military-bashing films. In Hollywood and at film festivals, such fare is highly praised. But in theaters around the country, the audience for films like Redacted is comprised mostly of empty seats. It’s almost as if Hollywood is producing films only for itself.

My experience in trying to get distribution for Indoctrinate U only confirms this. People in the film business just don’t take seriously the possibility that there’s a market for documentaries outside Hollywood’s typical Michael Moore/Al Gore worldview. I don’t know to what extent that’s out of political bias or the result of a simple Catch-22: they don’t see a market for anything different, but that’s because they’ve never tried distributing anything different.

That leaves us in the position of having to self-distribute Indoctrinate U. And because the Internet will allow us to put the film in people’s hands in the fastest, most cost-effective way possible, we’ll be able to conduct a little experiment of our own. Indoctrinate U will not be available on DVD right away. Instead, we’re going to focus our efforts on seeing whether the Internet can be used to route around the gatekeepers in Hollywood—without the shackles of physical media. (Although unlike Radiohead, I’m afraid, we’re not in a position to give our goods away for free.)

Who knows? Maybe the market can be proven without Hollywood’s help. I think it can. And once the market is proven, we’ll finally know who in the film business wants to serve customer desires instead of the dogma of Hollywood groupthink.