8 November 2006 >> Reporting for Pajamas Media: I bumped into actor Ron Silver at the victory party for Senator Joseph Lieberman.

7 November 2006 >> Reporting for Pajamas Media: Earlier this afternoon, Andrew Marcus and I visited a polling place in Hartford, CT and met a few Lamont campaigners.

25 October 2006 @ 9:13AM >> David Zucker, the writer and director of Airplane! and a number of other comedies, has recently been releasing humorous political ads online. Political involvement among Hollywood insiders is nothing new, but what makes Zucker’s recent work a man-bites-dog story is that he’s been doing ads for those evil Republicans, something which is sure to make him an anathema in his industry.

One of his recent ads, a send-up of the Clinton Administration’s foreign policy—complete with a Madeleine Albright stand-in who looks a little too accurate to be flattering—was deemed too hot for establishment Republicans, who declined to air it. No matter; these days, you can reach audiences online without expensive media buys.

Zucker’s latest piece looks at what life might be like if Democrats captured Congress and dictated the nation’s tax policy.

Has David Zucker stumbled onto a new model in political advertising? I think so.

25 October 2006 @ 8:15AM >> Imagine The View (but with younger women) combined with The Daily Show (but with a more right-of-center sensibility), and the result might look something like The America Show.

27 September 2006 >> In the wake of the controversy that erupted over the Pope’s citation of a centuries-old quote, one thing that seems absent from all the reporting is the historical context of the quote. This short video from the folks at The People’s Cube fills in some of the blanks.

4 May 2006 >> Stuart Browning, one of my business partners in On The Fence Films, stopped by the May Day protest in San Francisco to gather some footage. He also noticed signs and banners from the various extremist groups that backed the protest, and wonders why the establishment media is glossing over the radical nature of the organizers.

El Uno de Mayo, his two-city report (which incorporates some of my footage from New York), is now available for free online viewing.

4 May 2006 >> Earlier today, Power Line posted an in-depth video report of the May Day protests held around the country this past Monday. The effort was coordinated by documentary filmmaker Andrew Marcus, who edited and narrated the report

I shot some of the New York City footage, and contributed a few comments to the report via phone interview. It’s been quite a while since I’ve been able to dedicate enough time to creating a short video for Brain Terminal, but with the work on Indoctrinate U winding down this summer, I hope to be able to post some new videos of my own in the not-too-distant future.

2 May 2006 @ 4:07PM >> Stuart Browning, one of my partners in On The Fence Films, took his video camera to the May Day protest in San Francisco yesterday. For now, he’s got a series of stills from the rally; in a few days, he’ll be posting a video covering multiple cities.

Also, documentarian Andrew Marcus leads a multi-city team in covering the protests in conjunction with PowerLine and Pajamas Media. He’s got a few scenes from the protests, and will also be following up with more footage later this week.

3 April 2006 >> The website Power Line, which achieved international fame for its role in the downfall of Dan Rather, has launched an online video news service.

In addition to providing video reports from established news sources, Power Line News Video is also soliciting contributions from independent videographers wishing to find distribution for their own work. Power Line, as one of the most-visited sites in the blog world, would undoubtedly provide an impressive platform for video reporters seeking a sizable audience.

24 February 2006 @ 1:51PM >> Here’s a funny and endearing 15-minute video that has nothing to do with politics but is not at all politically correct: Yellow Fever. Enjoy!

2 February 2006 @ 10:39AM >> Some protesters in Chicago’s Daley Plaza seem to think so. Documentarian Andrew Marcus has the video.

The patriots protesting are still calling for revolution, it seems. Wake me up when it starts.

2 January 2006 >> A rap video spoof by a pair of Saturday Night Live veterans has become something of an Internet hit.

I can see why. It’s funny and different.

And it makes you wonder about the future of broadcast. Tivo and other DVRs give SNL an opportunity to be seen by people who are otherwise not in front of their TVs on a Saturday night, but the Internet got this video in front of people who aren’t in the habit of recording the show in the first place. That’s the way you build an audience.

It’s just another example of the increasingly blurred line between online and broadcast video. Can full-catalog video-on-demand via the Internet be far behind?

30 September 2005 >> Yesterday, for the first time, I watched an entire TV show online—and I wasn’t breaking the law!

Google Video, a new beta-test site from the search engine company, made available the premiere episode of Chris Rock’s new sitcom “Everybody Hates Chris.”

Not only was the show pretty damn funny—it has now earned a coveted spot on my TiVo—but the picture and sound quality were impressive. There was no skipping or stalling, the video window was large enough to make for enjoyable viewing, and the quality of the motion and resolution was impressive.

Hopefully, this isn’t just a one-time publicity stunt; I’d love to watch more shows this way. Of course, since the online episode was free and it contained no ads, I’m not expecting this service to be a permanent fixture without some sort of modification to the business model.

Now if only Google Video would add “The Office”...

15 September 2005 >> Pallywood is a short documentary, available online, that shows how freelance Palestinian cameramen are funneling staged “war footage” through major media outlets into homes throughout the world. Naturally, these staged shots are engineered for the highest emotional propaganda value, intended to get the viewer to sympathize with the Palestinian cause.

SecondDraft.org exposes how broadcast media are duped—perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not—into becoming unpaid assistants of the Palestinian media effort.

Update: This article in Commentary magazine, sent in by reader Bill Walsh, indicates that what you see in Pallywood is just the tip of the iceberg.

30 August 2005 @ 11:06AM >> Documentary filmmaker Andrew Marcus recently told me he’d be traveling to Crawford, Texas to cover the protesters and anti-protesters. That was a few days ago, and he has now posted some pictures and video from his visit.

18 July 2005 @ 3:08PM >> Until recently, the official seal of Los Angeles County bore three very small cross emblems recalling the county’s heritage and founding. A lawsuit by the ACLU ended that, and the religious symbols have since been scrubbed from the seal.

The Constitution’s establishment clause forms the legal basis of the ACLU’s argument:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

To me, it seems pretty extreme to argue that the presence of a religious symbol on a county seal is tantamount to the establishment of an official religion. If you’ve seen a supermarket tabloid in the last fifty years, you’d know that Los Angeles County isn’t exactly being run by fundamentalist Christians.

Nevertheless, enough judges agree with the ACLU that, bit by bit, different facets of our country’s history are being etched out if they contain any hint of the religious backgrounds of our founders. That’s as much a crime against history as pretending that Martin Luther King wasn’t black.

The controversy surrounding the Los Angeles County seal gave an opportunity for Anna of Liberty Belles to perform her own video investigation, complete with a guest appearance of Dennis Prager.

22 February 2005 @ 5:58PM >> Maybe you’ve heard about these billboards that will taunt Hollywood’s glitterati as they shuffle into the Oscars for their annual festival of self-congratulation.

Well, Anna of Liberty Belles decided to go out and ask some Hollywood residents what they thought of the signs. The resulting video, called Boomerang, shows that most people were a little confused. But one thing’s clear: Anna’s great on camera. I’m betting this won’t be her last video.

16 February 2005 >> Maybe I am overly sentimental, but I just watched a collection of political TV commercials from Iraq, and I found the whole experience to be very moving.

10 November 2004 @ 3:39PM >> This video is sure to make some people mad. Others, it will make laugh. Which category will you fall into?

13 October 2003 >> I spent Saturday filming a pro-Palestinian rally at Rutgers University. While there, participants and organizers alike tried to shut down my camera. For a while, they surrounded me and hit the front of my camera with signs to stop me from filming the rally’s speakers. Eventually, they backed off after realizing that cameras from several other media outlets—including NBC News, WCBS-TV, and Channel 12 New Jersey—were capturing their actions.

Update: Apparently, I am not the only one to have faced the wrath of protesters seeking to censor citizen journalists. More >>