Videojournalism-as-cinema: reinventing television news, as the new videojournalists

Next month I'm speaking at the World Documentary Conference in Falmouth about this strange new film form called: videojournalism-as-cinema.

As with most academic presentations, I had to produce an abstract; a brief about my presentation, which is a couple of paras down.

But videojournalism-as-cinema is not some abstract theory of a film form. It was born from various questions.

Before Vjism, smallest camera made  in 1947 B&H  Filmo

• Why do video news providers struggle to capture the attention of various audiences, generally younger 15-30 years? 
• How did News networks muck up this thing called videojournalism by making you think it was all about one person making the news, when such practices are as old as news?
• What is the point of Videojournalism-as-cinema?
• Why would we pay to go to the cinema, but not pay to go and watch the news?
• What's some of the best cinema that's grabbed you?

At its heart it proposes ways to reach users by considering aesthetics, form function, style, technology, cultural and sociological and ideological values,  and human behaviour.

Here's the abstract
‘The first impulse is to record it or to interpret it’, says Film Director Martin Scorcese (Silver Docs, 2006), being interviewed about filmmaking. He adds: ‘One says to record it is documentary and to interpret it is dramatic fiction’.

This ‘common sense’ view has persisted when comparing the television documentary form and Hollywood’s subjugation of the word cinema to denote dramatic fiction.

Academic studies, coupled with the pragmatism of filmmakers have yielded forms such as Cinéma Vérité (O’Connell, 2010), Docufiction (Lipkin, Paget & Roscoe, 2006) and the journalistic essay in Personal Cinema (Rascaroli, 2009). These forms imbricate cinema modes e.g. visualisation, structure etc. with non-fiction forms, such as news and the television documentary.

In this presentation, using empirical evidence, David Dunkley Gyimah maps out the infusion of cinema in news making that stems from within the discipline of videojournalism.

An under researched field, videojournalism’s public reframing is much needed, however in his 20-minute slot, Dunkley Gyimah presents evidence of a stylistic form used by exemplary videojournalists, known as videojournalism-as-cinema.

Arguably, mains stream news (MSN) uses cinema artefacts, but according to Dunkley Gyimah videojournalism-as-cinema practitioners are more overt in their appropriation of dramatic fiction styles as influences, as well as cinema’s earlier framework in Russian cinema.

The implications are many, but in this instance, Dunkley Gyimah focuses on how videojournalism exemplars create news films that are memorable.

Above all it involves the effective communication of ideas involving a wide pool of styles.

follow David @viewmagazine

  
Video journalism's anti-aesthetic short from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

Biblio

O’Connell, P. J. (2010). Robert Drew and the Development of Cinema Verite in America. Illinois: Southern Illinois University.

Leyda, J. (1983) Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film - Study of the  Development of Russian Cinema, from 1896 to the present. Princeton: Princeton  University Press.

Lipkin, S. N., Paget, D., & Roscoe, J. (2006). ‘Docudrama and mock-documentary: Defining terms, proposing canons’ . In: Rhodes, G. D. & Springer, J. P. ed. Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, 11-26. (6^th Ed). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co

Rascaroli, L. (2009). The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film London: Wallflower Press.

Silver Docs (2006). ‘Interview with Martin Scorsese, Documentary Vs Narrative’. AFI Discovery Channel Documentary Festival. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/wactch?v=RHFmjGxB0lU [Accessed: 5th September 2013].

Bio.

David Dunkley Gyimah is a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster lecturing in videojournalism, documentary and online/ social network practices. A former broadcast journalist/producer at BBC Newsnight/ (1990) Channel 4 News and ABC News South Africa, Dunkley Gyimah is also one of the UK’s first NUJ recognised videojournalists in 1994. He is the recipient of a number of innovation and journalism awards e.g. Knight Batten and is chair of the jury for Broadcast Innovation at the RTS. Dunkley Gyimah is an artist in residence at the Southbank centre and has recently submitted his PhD that examine videojournalism and its offerings towards a future journalism. He graduated from Falmouth postgrad in journalism in 1989. His work can be viewed from the sites his built 

• www.videojournalism.co.uk
• www.viewmagazine.tv and
• www.viewmag.blogspot.com

Jon Snow's gaza piece. There's objectivity, compassion and professionalism. Broadcasting needs a reboot

Jon Snow’s Gaza appeal risks reducing reporting to propaganda 

Journalists have cried ‘something must be done’ before, but they must avoid emoting

The headline appeared in the Guardian newspaper and has split the broadcasting fraternity. I replied on the Guardian site and have reposted here.

++

I guess Loyn's use of the word 'risks' allows from some wiggle room.

There is a classical illusionary view that the grandees of television news adhere to - an 'objective' approach. 

Thank goodness then for an alternative outlet e.g. the web.

Because while there are some pretty unprofessional things in this space, it does allow for reportage of a kind that is responsible e.g. Jon Snow's appeal, but does not have to wear the detached, impersonable clothes of reportage Wyndham Goldie, the Sykes Committee et al prescribed for news. 

Those rules for impartiality were a veil of protection for misleading the public, but their blanket adoption meant reporters would not be allowed to show any emotion.

BBC news presenters placed behind a screen (1954) were the most extreme of this emotion ban. 

Granted it's held pretty well and yes TV might be a different place, if in every piece a reporter spoke personally about what they saw, or said hello to dad and shed a tear describing their experience.

[see Al jazeera reporter, though I'm not sure about the hello bit.] But for goodness sake, give it a rest when you go online. 

Online isn't just an adjunct platform for broadcasters, though perhaps some wish it was. It's a place where reporters don't have to be bound by regulations. 

That nuance is easily separable. Similarly in blogs, and magazines, such as the New Statesman where Jeremy Bowen expressed his opinion about human shields in Gaza, it should be the prerogative of the journalist to say what they want whilst being professional. 

Insofar as they adhere to television's impartiality ruling on TV and from Snow's conduct grilling both sides in this affair, this appears fair, what's the fuss? 

The converse and bogeyman to all this is the US and the lack of a fairness decree, but the lack of impartiality does not preclude honesty and the journalism industry should be working to find new ways of codifying the profession in the 21st century.

Richard Sambrook talks about transparency. It's one of several routes.   There's a lot to be said about US scholar Michael Schudson's point that: journalism is a cultural construct bound by literary and social conventions.

Thus, you should be able to report emotion without risk being a propagandist.

Post script.. added

Roy Greenslade weighs in stating there is no such thing as objectivity in journalism

More notes: It must be remembered why impartial journalism was introduced into broadcasting. In Grace Wyndham Goldie's autobiography, she points to the limited number of news outputs at the time ( circa 1940s) that led to various committees setting up and maintaining impartiality.

How's your google glass? Google's world

David Dunkley Gyimah at Google Glass HQ in London testing glass

How's your glass?

Doh!  I meant the one you're wearing, not your $1500 50mm lens.

And so it was that another conventional term transmogrified, forever lost by a community of photojournalists to a populace comparing the aesthetic, ergonomic and tech functionality of their google glass wear.

It wouldn't be the first and last time a word has been misappropriated; there's Face time, killer, and videojournalism. Get over it!

Currently in its development phase, piquantly pegged as 'Explorer programme', Google's X project behind the driver-less car, is also reprogramming the fixed 'hunched back' surfer.

Glass' raison detre is a no brainer for how it will revolutionise the web, and mobile data retrieval. When I made this 'wild claim', Lars put me in my place in twitter.

Oh no I added, you've misunderstood me. Many of those core-functions, walking and texting, double-bent over a latte watching Breaking Bad, as the person next to you lifts your bag, should reduce in numbers.

At face value, Glass is a mobile phone attached to your right-eye, and so it eliminates all the functions that involve you having to look down onto a screen.  

Hence, it mimics futuristic car dashboards  and I can see how institutions will sanction their students wearing glass thus reducing those pesky social networkers from hiding behind a screen sending their loved ones emoticons.

However mind your glass: there is a version that comes with no lens and thus by this absence draws attention to the device itself. There is another version,  with lenses I'm wearing which disguises the glass's functionality.

It still draws attention, but also masquerades as fancy specs with a wierd thing on the side.

In fashion shows, no one need peek into their screen, and miss the bit where Ms Campbell does something spectacular. Meanwhile as the show unravels, premium front row members will be accessing data  e.g. price, background videos relevant to the show.

Easy really, all you need is to produce bespoke sites that glass can access. Glass becomes the utility as well as the phrase for those that wear it.

Google's quest to have their product mass adopted is not a question of technological determinism. It won't happen because it must, but because as Professor Brian Winston points out technology is usurped by a need, a supervening necessity.

Pricing, will be key, and the sums will no doubt be caressed to push maximum take-up. Trend extrapolation provides a hint of what's to come.

First it was cameras and phones merging; the iPhone and iPad kickstarted an industry spawning new apps, accessories, and receptive media-responsive websites. Glass will no doubt do the same. 

David in NY making a film using Glass

A new industry of websites lay ahead of us. In 2006, I envisioned the Outernet - a scenario where the Net breaks free of its fixed desk screen. Apple featured it on their profile page together with a hearty article that if you googled 'David' and 'Apple' there I was by my lonesome at no.1 in google. 

The mobile phone accessories industry will also be hit. This assumption comes from how filmmakers and their propensity towards more reality e.g. hyperreality,  plays out.

Anything that takes the fuss out of holding a camera as a community of head-mounted GoPros illustrate gives us a glimpse of how a permanent 'google' lens, which films 16g, will take its place.

In virtual reality, as witnessed during the Chinese Expo, Glass users may enjoy 3D virtual environments, where non glass users see the world in sight-3D.

Less talked about, but important no less is security. In London, spates of mobile phone thefts have risen, when all the users were doing was making a call. With glass in full display, either encrypted data or units that are keyed to work on unique frames, will deter opportunists.

Another feature is privacy. There is no visible guide for a recipient to acknowledge you're filming. These are issues that sociologists, technologists and cultural Neos will grasp to help shape a new discourse.

For me as a filmmaker, educator and web entrepreneur, its wider expansive use will come from revolutionising filmmaking, videojournalism and POVs that have become the norm.

 Think Cloverfield, Quarantine or Lady in the Lake - which involved singular, linear film views.








In any case it need not be POV, multiple filmmakers/ reporters will break open the proscenium of performance filming. Everything is on.

I could have done with it when shooting the last scenes for my PhD video in Southern Turkey.





The technology flow we're encountering with Glass is perhaps the redolent of those components associated with Star Trek. The mobile communicator, touch pad devices , holodeck and now a more elegant form of Geordi La Forge's visor have been represented.

Tele transportation, is that next?

follow David @viewmagazine

Thanks to Dominic and Ben at #GoogleGlass for letting me play with glass and taking these photots.

You can see more of my work here and here and here....:)

Be better at what you do - a short guide

On the morning after a presentation at the International Journalism Festival, I went for a run. I was so taken with the architecture of Perugia, that I came back to the hotel at 5.30, On the morning after a presentation at the International Journalism Festival, I went for a run. I was so taken with the architecture of Perugia, that I came back to the hotel at 5.30, grabbed my equipment and made this

A strategist would have suggested the term 'best' would have been more appropriate. In the eyes of mortals, Lionel Messi, Jordan, Ali, they were the best, but they all believed the could do better.

Best implies an ultimatum. It stops there. Whereas we never stop learning. We'd like to be better. There are individual philosophies in all these, which Linkedin members/ and others can guide us to. So here's a general guide to getting better.

1. Learn from the exemplars.

In any field there are a few, relative to the field's participants who have shaped the discipline. In mine which is media, it's Robert Drew, pioneer of Cinema Verite; Gilles Deleuze and Dziga Vertov. Learn all you can about them. Often embedded in their histories you'll discover their motives and the 'secret' that made them.

Robert Drew, who worked in photography at Life Magazine was tired of seeing television pictures that could not get close or track its subjects, so he took the principles of photography to create a new mobile camera and as such a new language, Cinema Verite. Below is a short interview from an hour interview I had with him.

2. Even giants, have masters.

Your exemplars have their own idols, so its worth tracking back again. Deleuze's ideas for understanding cinema emerged from Henri Bergson. This process of 'ping backs' could go on and on.

There are few times when an original idea emerges from thin air. Everyone is influenced by something. You can decide if you want to stop at your 'ping back' or go back further. I usually go back one more step and then focus on my exemplar in detail.

3. The conditions, what are the conditions?

Ideas are rarely universal. They are constructs from the society and culture you inhabit. For that reason, those ten point guides may be apt for the territory you live in (West), but not the East.

Look at the conditions. In China, our pitch really did revolve around socials e.g. Saki, Karaoke and foot massages. In the West this could be construed as play. The translation of fresh ideas into new territories tends to work when the hosts are receptive to receiving new ideas.

In television, a sizeable number of countries adopted the Western model of television news making, because it was deigned the best. In modern times, that's not necessarily so. Television, like so many things e.g. cooking food is a human construct.

The BBC is guided by regulations of impartiality, interpreted by editors. Fox TV, is not legally bound by impartiality rules, as the FCC ditched the fairness doctrine in 1987. Fox TV says it's impartial, but there's no external body to oversee this.

4. Be respectful, but not too deferential.

Your exemplar set a standard during a time, a period and place. History writes her or him up as a pioneer, but as times change, so do the conditions and society. Was Drew a pioneer? Yes! Was he correct for his time? Most likely! Is he right now? No! Is he still relevant? Yes.

Drew's premise was don't interrupt the filming process. His French counterpart, Rouch, believed you should, that is you should be allowed to ask a question.

In Drew's filming, if your subject says they've just committed a crime, you're not allowed to intervene and ask what it is. Who's right then? Neither and both. It all depends on the conditions, the environment and the audience. In my thesis on videojournalism-as-cinema, I explain what this means. [The link is not the actual dense Phd thesis language, but accessible articles on perception].

5. The audience, the audience.

Conditions are shaped by the audience. Audience are society, a focused group from society and culture. Yes, technology too shapes the audience. Ask the audience.

In 2006 I presented in Sweden on Television of the Future. The host had booked me on the strength of my online reputation. I had two presentations. One at 4.0'clock to about 200 people and another at 6.00 to more than a 1000.

During my 3. 0'clock presentation, a few people started walking out. By the end, the producer was a bit concerned. 'David it's not that they didn't like you, but that they did not understand some of the things you were saying', she said. Some months earlier I had presented at ONA New York, where it went really well. [see video]

'Right!' I said to my host, Amy, 'in the time between 5 0'clock and 6 0'clock we're going to rewrite this. If you don't understand it, then I'll take that as a guideline that the audiences won't'.

We changed it. At the end of the 6.0'clock session, I got the biggest bear-hug from Amy and a welcoming audience. It worked. Two key take-aways from this. No matter how good we think we are, we'd do well to put ourselves into the hands of the producer. She/he should know their audience better than you should. Nowadays, I always go earlier to the conference room and 'mark' it out, by asking questions from audience members, who perhaps may not know I am about to present. They don't have to be polite then.

6. Prep, prep, prep.

Yes, I could and do send my slides over to producers - all part of the presentation. Interestingly enough. In the West, we often stick to short, snappy power words on slides to provoke thought and catalyse our presentations.

In Middle Eastern, African and countries like China, powerpoint slides are equivalent to notes, so the clients more often than not request comprehensive data on power point slides to present to delegates.

But being better at what you do involves successions of preparation. The first attempt; the changes; the reflective look; more changes; more reflective; and then tweeking; leave alone; come back and do it again.

The process I describe above is allegorical and not the absolute direct steps for the process. It essentially means ideas are palimpsestic. They often require refinement.

Once in a while I'll come across a Masters student who has fixed ideas and doesn't want to go through this process, believing their version is perfect.

It is their prerogative. But it does make me think 'Why?'. Learning to prepare is a self-critical skill. How do you know what you know? What will be required of you? 

It is a painful, enjoyable, but a necessary process knowing that you could do better.

7. Humility.

Knowledge is not exclusively age-related, though wisdom general, but not necessarily comes with age. These boundaries are not fixed.

Humility means you're willing to take on board new experiences. The better practitioner is prepared to listen. She or he also tends to critique, rather than criticise.

They are different processes. The one who critiques finds logical reasons to explain. It is also a rhetorical process built on evidence. They also understand the need to praise good work and again offer cogent reasons for this.

The one who critiques provide routes for understanding, without believing there's is the best. They learn to collapse joint ideas, and re-synthesis, crediting where due. What I am writing here comes out of me, but is a combination of experience and many others' advice.

8. It's not personal.

In my career I have worked for some of the BBC and Channel 4's top shows e.g. Newsnight. I never once got a job through human resources, but I was always 'found' and invited to join a team.

That 'found' came from persevering and sometimes being in the right place. Being rejected, I have learned should not be taken personally. That's not to say you won't or can't. Some use this to better themselves. But don't get wound up. Move on and find the next challenge.

9. Surround yourself with friends.

Friends come in various guises. School friends who are loyal and aren't afraid to critique you. Friends at work, some of whom might tell you you're the best. School friends might do the same too.

In any case, you want those who will weigh you up, to help you by being candid. Perfection is a utopian ideal we strive towards. Accept the critique and if you have humility, you'll grow.

I had a driving instructor who was critical. A previous instructor treated my sessions as a joy ride. I know who I preferred.

10. Challenge yourself and recognise your limits.

Disperse those ideas, so you're forced to think of new ones. Share them too. Each time though, push against limits. I have just come back from a 6K run.

It was 3k a couple of weeks ago. It hurts, but I recognise that the run, the payoff with endorphins and the lasting effects spill over into all sorts of other disciplines.

Da Daah! Happy getting better!

@viewmagazine

David Dunkley Gyimah is a multiples international award-winning inovator in videojournalism and the web e.g. Knight Batten Awards. His recently completed PhD examines videojournalism debunking several myths as well as charting a course for the future. It includes an interview with the father of Cinema Verite Robert Drew. David isa senior lecturer at the University of Westminster, artist in residence at the Southbank Centre and chair of jurors at the RTS Broadcast Innovations Awards. You can see his work on www.viewmagazine.tv and www.videojournalism.co.uk

London Live - lives a little less - how to launch a station, not!

There is no joy in crowing about this misfortune. London is poorer for it. Given its depths at creativity and its imprimatur status at exporting media, this needed to work.

London's heartbeat ought to be pulsating to the contribution of the new kid. It isn't. Instead an atrophy of sorts is enveloping the station according to news reported by the Guardian.

The story is, a couple of months ago, London Live, a new entertainment/news station, which was part of the local license government initiative, launched. It was a vaudeville fan fare, made possible firstly by Jeremy Hunt MP. Critics said from the outset local TV would never work.

About the only thing the station was not going to do was invent TV, because its PR hail was it intended to reinvent it.

A salutatory lesson, if you intend to find the Higgs Boson of television. Don't talk about it, until you've truly found it and its verified by your peers.

Alas, today London Live is discovering some hard truths about launching a London station, particularly on a smallish budget of £14million a year. Yes that is change to a network.

And if you're going to reinvent TV, don't put it in the hands of dye-in-the-wool TV. A strange paradoxical statement, because if people in TV already had the answers, why were they not evident before hand? If you want to know the temperature of the water don't ask the fish!

Also, it would help if you don't try and rewrite television history. Claiming to be the first 24-hour station in London is, er, porkies.

Twenty years ago a station called Channel One launched its own London station. The press were by and large kinder. I happened to be one of the recruits. 

The general and misleading narrative is that Channel One was an unmitigated disaster.  This year, I completed a history of Channel One as part of my PhD submission which looks at a future of news form and storytelling.

The thesis is a critical account supported by evidence from its key players and its critics and so whilst it shows Channel One's flaws, it also corrects some myths such as the station's output.

This hero gram from industry figures gives some idea of the nature of its output.

Chris Cramer, then BBC head who went on to CNN praises Channel One.

Jane Root who would become a BBC Controller does too.

Mustn't get too carried away though because Channel One also had deep furrows running through it, which surfaced during my research. Partly this was down to creative tension, but paradoxically it also contributed to the creative zeal of individuals and the station at large.

So based on this week's news, here are just a few things London Live, from the outside appear to have not perfected.

1. Know that you need time. A few months in petitioning OFCOM that you want to change your brief to mainly abandoned local programming  suggests little knowledge of TV making. It's a long game. At Channel One there were not too dissimilar causes for concern in direction; but the first major one came after a couple of years.

2. Critically understand your audience.
At my own interview for Channel One I recall saying there was no need pitching at Telegraph loyalists, or the BBC audience. The BBC has vast resources. On the other hand if you're going after the youth audience, as London Live did, you're going to have to be radical and hold your nerve. And that also means being more radical than what you're doing at the moment.

3. Take advantage of the technology boon. Launching a station on cable/ satellite gives access to the living room audience, but the increasing trend is mobile and away from appointment-based TV.

Channel One's technology leg-up was videojournalism and a juke box that automatically played all the videotapes. Hence the station was never actually live and thus mitigated on air mistakes.

Surely London Live was made for the iPad generation, mixing print ( magazine articles) with rich video. p.s Endless discos ( short for discussions) doesn't make for exciting TV unless you have The Word in mind and you're planning something O.T.T. p.s.s If you don't know what The Word is and you're into British Youth TV, a quick lesson on wiki is in order.

4. Get ready for the brand fall out. That is be cautious about talking yourself up, because if it doesn't meet the audience's requirement, it's a long fall which could hurt the brand.
Channel One, also puffed its chest, but it had the innovation of an untried videojournalism practice to match.

5. Be flexible, find the gains and exploit them. Because you're local, get into and establish a rapport with community groups.  Channel One had more than 30 videojournalists whom at times stayed put in communities and built up a rapport, London Live has around ten.

Part 1 of 2/

The fog of television and truth - the Daily Show

It is seen as the harbinger of truth, the deliverer of objective and impartiality news, illustrated by innumerable research. 

The most recent UK survey shows television news to be the most trusted; 75% of those surveyed rely on television for their news, compared with other media.

In the US television's trust quotient also runs high.

Any news transmitted across television screens invariably reaches a sizeable percentage of the population, and forces its content to be  taken seriously, to be believed, irrespective of the territory.

It is the reason why in the event of military coups, agents head straight for the television station, and why influential figures with media interests want to own one.

America's television news comes under scrutiny in US satirist Jon Stewart's Daily Show. Stewart lampoons, amongst other things, but mainly, the current reporting of the Israel-Hamas-Palestinian people story.




Stewart prods the coverage finding satire in an incendiary situation. The modus operandi mirrors what the alternative comedy scene started in the UK in the 1980s, with Tony Allen and Alexi Sayle, leading to shows such as Spitting Image.

I digress, however.

Looking to post on Stewart, I couldn't find a clean feed of the show at the time of writing, but did come across liberal viewer's  (LV) take on the show, which has amassed more than 700,00 views.

Now, this post isn't about LV per se. It seeks to provide necesssary context behind that thorny issue of impartiality.  In part, as you'll see it's a conflict between television, as an organ of truth and ownership by private individuals.

Using Stewart's Daily Show, LV also compares Fox News' coverage questioning a Palestnian legal advisor and an Israeli government official as a motif for impartial reportage. 

But there's a layer of explanation that should precede this, which is often absent from debates.

By dint of anything being shown on the television, the audience is inclined to believe what they see and hear. It is after all television, but it was crystallised by the regulators in the US (Federal Communications Commission) and the 1935 Selsdon Committee on behalf of Ramsay MacDonald's UK Labour governement.

Television was new. In her autobiography, Britain's pioneer of Television at the BBC Grace Wyndham Goldie writes of this new medium,

"The governed, in their millions could, at a single moment, see and judge the governors; the governors could appear to millions of individuals simultaneously and sway their emotion not only by their voices but by whatever personal magnetism and visual authority theiy possessed".

The BBC imported its doctrines of fairness and impartiality from radio to this new medium.  Its charter and licence was designed so that the 'BBC should not broadcast its own opinions in the matter of public policy'.

In the UK the 'impartiality rule' holds for UK broadcasters at the BBC, and Independent Television via the regulatory body OFCOM.

As explained by a former BBC senior executive, now Professor of Journalism at Cardiff University, Richard Sambrook notes,

'Impartiality means acting fairly because you are not personally involved or have to put to one side of your personal views or feelings. The elimination of bias'.

In effect, notwithstanding the regulations, impartiality it is an aspired to quality, as in reality impartiality as a utopian ideal is impossible. 

It lies in the eye of the beholder. But the regulatory framework in the UK exists, to hold the BBC and ITV to account, when concerns are raised by viewers, politicians and academics.

Today, in the US, no such regulation exist that prescribes broadcasters, such as Fox, ABC or NBC that they must adhere to the principles of impartiality.

A year after Fox was launched in 1987, the FCC ruled that its fairness doctrine, created in 1949, should be dropped.

There is no legally-binding obligation for Fox or otherwise to be fair or unbiased. Like a newspaper that can show its political affiliation, US networks are free to show their colours too.

Fox, that LV analyses, is merely producing the sort of television news it is free to do.

The issue appears to be the misconception that US networks, and Fox in particular should be impartial because the audience defers back to the issue of televsision as a truth, fairness and balance organ.

They have to do no such thing. Comparing Fox TV's output then with a standard for impartiality isn't necessary.

The fog of conflict Israel-Hamas and Palestine 18th July 2014

If you wake up to the news, like me, and it has the propensity to colour your day, like me sometimes, then today was surely one of those grim days.

In effect there's never not a grim day around the world, but for the items of 'news interest' that find a broadcast outlet, it was difficult not to feel psychologically under siege and let your empathy run amok.

Jemima Kiss, head of technology at the Guardian newspaper captured it piquantly.

My day started with a flit around social media and looking at RSS feeds. Israel's forces ground invasion of Gaza was the expected big news today. Another grim cycle of deaths. 

It is impracticable and impossible not to write about the subject, without incurring the wrath of either an intellectual, whose view differs, but they can not contain their emotion, or a troglodyte without the etiqutte or understanding of rationale and rhetoric.

Civil argument gets lost, personal invectives get traded. 

Today, as only a cynical PR spokemsan might think, the downing of a civilian aircraft Malaysia Airline flight MH17, knocked the Israel-Hamas-Palestinian state story of the lead.  298 people murdered.

The opprobium was needed, the ourtage, barely enough to assuage the thought: 'What the **** is going on?'

Politicians and leaders are then called upon to say something poignant for the news; something matching the profoundness that resonates with: 'She was the people's princess', she was and that was different.

For now, I care less what PM David Cameron and the likes have to say. It has been the leader's collective insouciance that has contributed to this grim day.

Our thoughts go out to the families. News has started to build its narrative matching faces to circumstances and nationality. The senseless of it all and the human cost gnaws at you. Sorrow, anger, frustration.

Then this... confusion, but in a different guise. It is a piece entitled

Whose Palestine?

by Nathan Thrall

 

It contains passages like this.

"For a moment in early June, it seemed to many Palestinians that their political leadership was on the verge of making a historic shift".

and 

"The resulting crackdown on Hamas by Israeli forces working in coordination with Palestinian security forces 
..."
and this...

"But in early June, to the great surprise of Fatah, Egypt, Israel, and the US, Hamas agreed to renounce responsibility for administering Gaza..."

Thrall's piece had clearly caught attention, as the tweet attracted quite some activity.

The day is far from over, and no doubt the grimness of the news stands to get worse. Thrall's piece though sheds some background knowledge on a situation so fuzzy from the fog of confusion.

Read Thrall's piece here.

Digital Storytelling and future videojournalism

Call it neo-videojournalism, Cinematic (doesn't do it justice) or videojournalism-as-cinema.

The revolution is ongoing, but it's below the radar now. The big peaks were YouTube, Twiter, Vine, but innovation is not technology dependent. Next up, Oculas, Touchcast e.g.

If we search long and hard enough, we'll find something... cracks...nuggets of new wisdom.

But we have a fundamental problem. We often don't know where to search, or we don't know where else to look, other than the debris created when a new app hits the market.

Truth is the answer to fundamentals of our questions lay in the past. Historians recognise the circularity of life. Archeologists rely on history, linguists too, media is no different. McLuhan knew this too.

Since the dawn of time, we've told linear stories, and spatial ones ( Caves). We have yet to detour to a new world of imaginary lines, what mathematicians refer to as the -i plane.  e.g  what is the sqaure root of -4 ? Exactly!

We made do one day, but it requires a cognitive leap in understanding that it may not happen in this lifetime. In China, a cinema mimics the conditions on the screen e.g. Snow, blizzards, a skateboarder riding across rough ground as your seat simulates the bumps.

But this is small fry. When we're physically in the film and its narrative adapts to your thinking that's another world entirely. Imagine the algorithms for that? 

The past provides some degree of cognitivism. Understand the person, you get to know their motives.

Videojournalism.co.uk trades on this understanding and I share some brief rational concepts from my Phd thesis examining the future.

Recalibration of videojournalism.

Publishing today.. the recalibration of videojournalism...