Recently, Charles Johnson and his readers debated if CNN ran faked footage of an attempted resuscitation of a wounded young boy in a Gaza hospital, in a video supplied by a Palestinian stringer. CNN initially pulled their video, and a day later reinserted it into their lineup, claiming:

Responding to accusations that the resuscitation efforts of Mashharawi's brother appeared inauthentic, Martin said that, based on his years of reporting from Gaza, doctors often go through such efforts even with little hope that a patient can be saved.

Charles Johnson responded:

If they really had "little hope" the patient could be saved, they'd be going all out with CPR, which means very vigorous chest compression (it's not unusual to break ribs if it's done right), and ventilation to oxygenate the blood--not delicately touching the boy's abdomen with the tips of their fingers as we see in the video clips.

But if the jury is still out on that clip, let's take a video look at news from this decade that we know conclusively was botched, including:

• The New Republic's Danger Man, Scott Thomas Beauchamp.
• Reuters' Picture Kill fiasco.
• Former CNN chief Eason Jordan claimed US (and Israeli) troops targeted journalists For assassination--but was surprisingly cool about working with Saddam Hussein.
• Hurricane Katrina and the "Echo Chamber in the Superdome."
• Document Dan Rather.
• Jayson Blair.
• And the grandfather of 'em all: Walter "Boom Boom" Duranty.

Keep rockin'--and watch for cameos by Larry Kudlow, Hugh Hewitt, and John Hinderaker!

(If you missed any of the previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and just keep scrolling.)

Update: Welcome readers (viewers?) from Little Green Footballs, VodkaPundit, the Brothers Judd and Danny Glover!

More: Welcome also readers from Pundits Insta and Gateway--and from Dr. Melissa Clouthier.

With a revival of the Fairness Doctrine making ripples in the news, we at Silicon Graffiti HQ know that it's important to diversify our video blogging. Last year, we explored the Top Ten Gaffes from Hillary Clinton. So in the name of Fairness, we're listing the chief gaffes of the winners of the 2008 presidential election as well.

Thrill to President-Elect Barack Obama in defense of high gas prices (when those prices were nearing their peak) and spreading the wealth--to all 57 states! And of course...The Top Ten Gaffes of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., demonstrating the continuing viability of Seinfeldian Opposite Theory in action.

Believe me, it wasn't easy culling the list down to ten, especially when this late entrant came in over the transom this weekend. But even if you've drunk deep the Oba-Kool-Aid, hopefully you'll enjoy what's here.

(Bumped to top. Incidentally, for many more videos, start here and keep scrolling.)

One reader emailed that he wasn't able to view my "In Dodd We Trust?" video earlier in the week apparently because of bandwidth issues. If you've had similar problems, that video is now up on my YouTube page. (The higher res, higher bandwidth version is still available here.)

And if you received a DV camera in your stocking today and want to put it to work, I have an article that recently went live on Videomaker magazine's Website on the rudiments of videoblogging titled "Medium Cool: Launching Your Own Video Blog."

In his 2001 book, The CEO of the Sofa, P.J. O'Rourke wrote:

The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take 100 of its most prominent numskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.

But of course, with every new bailout, the Senate is becoming further and further intertwined with the public sector, and doing increasing harm. As Frank Martin noted in a recent post on his Varifrank blog, "This is how it ends. As of right now, the Senate IS the banking system":

You just try prying the banking system from the hands of the Senate now. You want a loan? Sure, lets just check your voting record, lets see what kind of car you want to buy, oh darn its not a certified government "greenmobile", well sorry Mr. Consumer, we can't give you a loan for that new Toyota Dual Axle truck for your ranch, but how about a new Chevy Cobalt Hybrid? Sure thing. Sign right here Mr. Consumer.

SNAP! That's just how easy it is for you to find that you no longer have any economic choices. No banks - then no bank loans. No bank loans - then no economy. In point of fact, your entire economy is now run by just 100 people. 100 people that if most of us were in an elevator and any one of them got on, we would then get off and walk up the rest of the building rather than risk our well being by exposed to their close proximity.

Hence the subject of my newest Silicon Graffiti, which begins with a parody of Charles Schwab's 2007 ad campaign (with a little help from the cartoon plug-in from After Effects CS4) before exploring the auto bailout, and the banking bailout. And the good old days (by comparison), when Congress would look at a giant corporation and decide the best way to break it up, not prop it up. When it was wasn't defaulting on its own debts, of course.

And along the way, a look back at some early warnings from the 1990s, and going even further back, a flashback from Vice President Elect Joe Biden to President Abraham Roosevelt Franklin Washington's early televised fireside chats from the 1860s. And a timely paraphrase of the Bard of Springfield.

This is our 23rd edition of Silicon Graffiti ,which began in January of this year--you can explore the back catalog by starting here and scrolling through. It's a mixed lot, but on the average, we hope our approval rating is on the north side of these numbers.

(Also posted at Right Wing News, where I'm one of several guest bloggers this week.)

Welcome viewers and listeners of Cam Edwards of NRA News--you can watch the video comparing and contrasting two very different television news reports of elderly vets attacked that we were discussing right here.

I originally produced the above clip, "Mugging For The Camera," back in early April as part of my Silicon Graffiti series of videoblogs, and uploaded it first to my primary video server, where I posted it here and it got a fair chunk of traffic in the Blogosphere. I then uploaded it to YouTube for hosting on my page there.

Last year, one of the subjects of the video, television reporter Rebecca Aguilar, then with Dallas-based KDFW, received a firestorm of attention (here's our post, which links to others) for her badgering tone when attempting to interview an elderly Army vet whose business was robbed on multiple occasions, and fought back. (She was eventually let go by the station.)

In late March, when a TV station in northern California reported in a rather upbeat manner about the bravery of another elderly vet who fought back rather than be mugged, it seemed to be quite a contrast to the report that aired in Dallas.

As part of my Silicon Graffiti video series, I wanted to place those two video clips side by side, as well as include comments made by other journalists and bloggers, such as the proprietors of Breitbart.TV (who are local television vets themselves), and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com, all of which was clearly within the context of fair use.

On November 18, the page containing the above video was the subject of a DMCA take-down notice sent to YouTube by KDFW. YouTube, quite appropriately, took down the video and sent me a copy of the notice. My wife and attorney sent a counter notice, and after waiting the appropriate time, YouTube restored the content earlier this evening with a note that my account would not be penalized, which means that this won't count against me on YouTube's "repeat offender" list.

As others have noted, YouTube is quick to pull videos whenever there's a whiff of controversy or a dispute regarding them. But I'm glad to see this video back up--to the best of my knowledge, it's the only record available on YouTube at the moment of newscaster Rebecca Aguilar's original report, the others having been removed due to KDFW's objections. (See here, here and here.) But it's also a reminder not to rely on the site as your primary or, especially, your only video host.

I hadn't planned it this way when I started working on the new video late last week, but the timing of Monday's news of fresh disaster from old media makes the latest Silicon Graffiti remarkably timely.

But first, let's define the title.

From Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass:

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Back in early 2007, I started wondering if the accelerating decline of print newspaper readership, media advertising revenues, and the upcoming election year were creating a strange new tone in the media. And near the tail-end of an election year in which the media weren't afraid to let you know who to vote for--and who they were voting for--Michael Malone of ABC and Pajamas Media wrote:

Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power . . . only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, ten years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway - all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself: an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career. With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country . . .

So here's a look at how the media got there, beginning in sepia toned 1926 when mass media was born with the first radio networks, all the way to the days of the Web, the Blogosphere, and the surprising impact Craigslist has had on classified advertising revenue--and a look at declining newspaper advertising in general.

This accelerating downward spiral has completed unnerved much of old media--to the point where a newspaper in a city once known 160 years ago for its residents' spectacular success at mining for gold completely overlooked the solid gold story dropped into their laps, helping to create a remarkably holographic presidential candidate.

(For 21 or so older Silicon Graffiti videos, click here and keep scrolling. And a special thanks to my friend Jenifer Toksvig for doing such a terrific job of recording the opening narration.)

In the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, I take a look at anger in American politics. The title derives from the nifty book on the topic by Peter Wood, whom I interviewed near the end of the 2008 election for PJM Political.

Look for:

• The exterminating Olbermann!
  
• Terry Tate, sacking Sarah!
  
• Dehumanizing bumper stickers!
  
• Code Pink has a plan to stick it to the man!
  
• Open Mic Night!
  
• Shocking signs!
  
• The don't taze me bro!
  
• Five Easy Pieces!
  
• America's favorite ex-Weatherman!
  
• And the world's favorite Teutonic terror tyke!
  

The Five Easy Pieces clip, which Wood deconstructs in the above video is a tremendous touchstone of early 1970s anger. I had planned to connect it to this passage from David Frum's 2000 book on the 1970s, How We Got Here, but it would have taken the video above the YouTube-friendly ten minute cut-off mark. Of course, there are so many examples of anger run amok from the 2008 campaign, that this video could have run infinitely longer than that. (There's a reason why Michelle Malkin's 2005 book on the topic ran for 256 pages.)

For previous Silicon Graffiti videos, click here.

Just received my copy of the December issue of Videomaker magazine, which contains my Camcorder Buyer's Guide 2008--complete with a cameo appearance by James Lileks, fresh off documenting hecklers at the GOP convention for the Strib.

(For what to aim those camcorders at--besides protests and hecklers--click here.)

While I making the expected post-election inspection tour of NRO's Corner, I spotted this sad news from Ian Murray:

Michael Crichton has died "unexpectedly," with reports suggesting a private struggle against cancer. may he rest in peace. He was one of the few people publicly interested in science with the courage to speak out against the direction environmental politics had pushed it. All who want to honor his memory should read his Caltech speech, Aliens cause global warming.

In addition to having the courage to dissent against the near-monolithic global warming orthodoxy, he also managed to do a pretty good job of predicting the future of the legacy media in 1993. As Jack Shafer wrote back in May in Slate:

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled "Mediasaurus," in which he prophesied the death of the mass media--specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. "Vanished, without a trace," he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances--"artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page"--swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

* * *
As we pass his prediction's 15-year anniversary, I've got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It's gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren't going extinct tomorrow, Crichton's original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

Call it, "The End of Journalism." That's what Victor Davis Hanson did recently, whom I interviewed on today's edition of PJM Political on XM, about his latest essay, in which he wrote, "Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place."

All of which were the themes of a June edition of Silicon Graffiti:, which paired my thoughts on Crichton with another pair of futurists, Alvin and Heidi Toffler:

Welcome Mark Steyn and Brothers Judd readers.

I knocked this one together pretty quickly last night; I thought the speech by David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow certainly takes on some interesting nuances when combined with the stories his self-styled successors chose to ignore or downplay in an election year. And what mediation on the thoughts of Morrow wouldn't be complete without a cameo from longtime Reebok spokesbacker, Terry Tate?

(Bumped to top--welcome Brothers Judd and Dirty Harry's Place fans.)

Both my prerecorded Silicon Graffiti video blog and PJTV, Pajamas' live Internet TV coverage out of L.A. use virtual sets, and this new article of mine at Videomaker magazine explains how they work. (This demo reel for Adobe's Ultra 2 product is a pretty good video intro in and of itself.)

Of course, first you need a green screen--but that's a topic I explored at Videomaker last year.

In March of 2007, the election campaign essentially began when a consultant for Sen. Obama released this Apple 1984 mashup, which quickly went viral with over five a half million views:

Yesterday, a blogger at Red State brought things full circle:





But then, I'm rather partial to 1984-inspired videos:


And welcome to the readers of "Dirty Harry's" film blog, who have some kind words to say about our latest production.

Update: More fun from Airstrip One, here.

In the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we visit industrious Outer Party Member Winston Smith hard at work in the Ministry of Truth, and look at how history can be turned on a dime, including:

• The Pivot on the Iraq War.
• Hollywood and the Iraq War.
• All media, all malleable.
• Pivots by Dalton Trumbo and Pete Seeger during World War II.
• World War II revisionism today.
• One man's new found respect for private property and the Chicago P.D.!
• And a homage to the most Kafkaesque secret agent of 'em all. Be seeing you!

This is the 19th edition of our ongoing Silicon Graffiti videoblog series, which began in January of this year; click here for all of the previous editions.

The question this presidential election year isn't whether or not there will be an October surprise--but how many of them we should expect:

(Previous editions of our Silicon Graffiti video blog, going back to the start of the year, can be found here.)

Steve Green spots a late entrant to a topic I explored in video form back in May:

Update: J.R. Taylor writes, "Thanks for the first Jon Astley reference I've seen in ages..."

Ed Driscoll.com: Internet-based community organizer in an increasingly demassified postmodern world through the collectively remembered flotsam and jetsam of a once unified pop culture!

This past summer, Rick Perlstein, the author of the new biography called Nixonland, looked back on the period leading up to Richard Nixon's 1968 election and told Reason magazine that in his opinion, "Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left", adding:

"It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys--you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was."

It certainly was strange, compared with the nation's politics at the start of the 1960s.

In the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we take a look back at the film, its radical chic times, and its champion--Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who would reject traditional culture for "trash cinema." And we'll also look at Bobby Kennedy's Fascist Moment--and even a Bonnie & Clyde-related excerpt the fourth edition of Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan's A Quick And Dirty Guide To War. Which sounds like one meaty, beaty, big and bouncy little video to me.

Tommy guns and fedoras are optional, of course.

(Previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, going back to the start of the year, can be found here.)

Update: Welcome readers of InstaPundit, the Brothers Judd, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog at NRO, and--appropriately enough--the New Nixon Blog. Please look around, there's lots here we think you'll enjoy.

After the 2004 presidential election, the left started billing themselves as "The Reality-Based Community"--as opposed to those faith-based Christianist God worshipers on the other side of the aisle.

And yet, the left isn't above asking a higher power if He'd be willing to invoke a little smiting of his own from time to time...

(Earlier vlogulations found here.)

Well, out of control of old media, that is. In the Washington Times, Matthew Sheffield explains, "Candidates use Web for cheap, edgy ads". Your friend and humble narrator is mentioned here, right after Matthew discusses McCain's "The One" ad, which pokes fun at a certain obscure young Chicago community organizer's rapid rise to the dizzying heights Hollywood stardom:

Besides demonstrating how the Web can be cost-effective, "The One" phenomenon is illustrative of another way the Internet has become useful for the presidential campaigns: helping them spot organic political themes that they can help develop into larger ones. The inspiration behind the ad is straight out of the conservative blogosphere where it has proven enormously popular with center-right readers long dissatisfied with the elite press' love affair with Mr. Obama.

That inspiration isn't restricted to just online ads, either. Just this week, the McCain camp released an ad that looked astonishingly similar to a parody ad created by blogger Ed Driscoll, which combined Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's famous "3 AM" ad with a second segment telling viewers that Mr. McCain also could be relied upon to respond to a crisis situation.

It's highly likely this will continue to happen, Mr. Driscoll told me in an e-mail.

"While a campaign still has to spend large sums of money buying advertising time on TV, as the older generation still glued almost exclusively to the television tube begins to fade away, watch for the Web to continue to grow in power as the political advertising venue," he said.

He's exactly right. It's simply a matter of time.

Matthew was of course instrumental in organizing the sprawling Newsbusters blog. He emailed me yesterday afternoon alerting me that the above article would be online today, and asked me if I was in St. Paul. I wrote back that indeed I was--and was immediately following him on C-Span in this online video shot on Wednesday.

Say, that new John McCain ad in the above video with a 3:00 AM cameo from Hillary looks awfully familiar--almost as though it was created months ago...

Update: Welcome Instapundit, National Review Online and Riehl World News readers--please look around; there's lots here you may enjoy, both on the blog, and our video page.

Found via Orrin Judd, Lloyd Billingsley, who previously wrote "Hollywood's Missing Movies", which featured a plot summary of Total Eclipse, the greatest film Hollywood will never make, has a review of the new hagio-documentary, Trumbo:

Capitalism is evil and America is a horrible fascist place, the argument goes, except for my lucrative studio contract, except for my fat bank account, except for my mansion, my swimming pool, my ranch, and my luxury cars. That's why there were jokes about Robert Rich, one of Trumbo's pseudonyms. Trumbo, who died in 1976, tells those stories here, along with his one-man show of accredited victimhood, in which he gets some help. Former Nation editor Victor Navasky does a lot of the explaining, and his book Naming Names, a defense of the screen Stalinists, is conveniently displayed beside him.

Here is the familiar footage of the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on Communism in Hollywood, which foolishly focused on film content. The screen Stalinists were eager to testify but the strategy of defying the committee came straight from the CPUSA bosses. Trumbo is billed as an independent thinker and contrarian, but that didn't extend to Party bosses. When they laid down the law, they were obeyed. As John Huston later discovered, the strategy was all about protecting John Howard Lawson, the Party's straw boss in the studio talent guilds, and like Trumbo, an unpleasant fellow to those of other affiliations, even on the left.

Some studio people were friendly to the committee because the Party, in its heyday, wielded plenty of power in the studios and had made their lives miserable, doing all they could to quash their projects and ruin their careers. Trumbo provides not a hint of that background, nor why the committee came to Hollywood in the first place. It was the result of an investigation of Gerhard Eisler, a Comintern agent whose brother Hanns wrote scores for Hollywood movies. The Comintern isn't even mentioned a single time.

Footage from films such as Papillon and Spartacus shows how much Trumbo imposed the heroes-versus-informers template. He also has a brief role in Papillon as a prison commandant, which is appropriate. The Hollywood Communists maintained silence as Stalin kangaroo courted their fellow writers and artists into the gulag, or just killed them off. Nothing about that in Trumbo, nothing that would threaten his status as the icon of what, in Hollywood, passes for the Greatest Generation.

Trumbo will likely win an Oscar for best documentary, even though it's as much a fantasy as Tropic Thunder. Trumbo's back story and the tale of CPUSA overtures in Hollywood are much more dramatic and action packed, but so far no takers in the dream factories.

I know at least one Blogger who gave it a shot, however:

Which actually isn't saying all that much these days: take a look at Redacted's IMDB page. If you assume $9.00 a ticket, with its absolutely pathetic $65,087 domestic gross, that means Redacted was seen by about 7,232 people during its initial run in theaters. (As John Nolte likes to write, "Anyone care to debate how Hollywood's money driven?")

In contrast, my recent "2004: An MSM Odyssey" video was viewed by 8,507 people according to Brightcove, its Webhost.

...And I can safely guarantee that my budget was just a smidgen lower than Redacted's five million dollars.

Not surprisingly, I couldn't let the scandal involving John Edwards and Rielle Hunter go without doing a quick Silicon Graffiti on it. The video builds on--and brings up to date--an essay I contributed to the New Partisan in 2005, tying in today's media-created hucksters, with Orson Welles' last completed movie, F For Fake which had just come out on DVD back then. The new SG also quotes (in slightly truncated form), one of my favorite passages from an essay by Umberto Eco:

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it--he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

Fortunately, the customers seem to be much less credulous these days than those who supply the product.

"McCain Wins Russian/Georgian Conflict 3:00 A.M. Moment", according to Red State. But then, this wasn't too hard to predict back in March:

Because it's always 3:00 A.M., somewhere.

Ten minutes of video, 55-minutes of satellite radio, 30-minutes of podcasting, and all for the price of your broadband connection; just another week here at Ed Driscoll.com.

Seriously--be sure to check out the latter two items: Steve Green energetically ties together the disparate elements of this week's PJM Political, and Austin Bay interviews General David Petraeus, who phoned in from Baghdad.

(For any podcasting boffins in the audience, here's some gear talk: because of the poor phone connection, Gen. Petraeus initially sounded more like a call from here until I applied a massive amount of Izotope's RX audio restoration plug-in, followed by compressing the daylights out of the recording with their Ozone mastering plug-in.)

There's a hint of disappointment lurking in the subtext of John McCain's recent videos highlighting just how in the tank the MSM are for Obama; as Michelle Malkin quipped, "Hell hath no fury like a Maverick spurned". And while McCain may have initially counted on the media's support, he really should know better. While the media loved Maverick in the 2000 primaries--at least compared to that Bush guy--and for iconoclastic quotes afterwards, when presidential elections start in earnest, the MSM knows which party they're backing--and they're not afraid to let you know as well.

The latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, v-cast, Internet TV show, or whatever the kids are calling these things this week begins with this moment at the conclusion of the 2000 election and goes all the way to 2004's grizzly aftermath, and beyond. With a few surprises along the way...

(Previous editions of Silicon Graffiti can be found by tuning in here.)

"At rare intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not."

--Ring Lardner Jr., at Trumbo's memorial service in 1976.

Back in 2006, Mark Steyn noted that "Hollywood prefers to make 'controversial' films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won."

You can see that dynamic--or lack thereof--at work in the new documentary Trumbo that's hitting the art house circuit this summer on screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. It's a look at the Blacklist and McCarthyism of the 1950s that's brave and daring--a cutting edge triumph of dissent and free speech! ...As long as you're willing to discount the dozen-plus movies on the topic that Hollywood has made since the mid-1960s.

In contrast, did Hollywood produce or distribute any anti-Soviet Union films during that same time period? Not too many, needless to say; but we'll also look at the few that qualify--if only tangentially. Along the way, we also look at the convoluted real-life history of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun novel, which as Orrin Judd described in his review, is as byzantine a story as anything Trumbo wrote for the silver screen.

Those are the topics we explore in the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti video blog. It takes its title from an earlier article by Steyn, back when he reviewed the play that toured a few years ago starring Nathan Lane as Trumbo for the New Criterion. For our previous forays in videoblogging, tune in here.

Update: Andrew Breitbart looks at the new Hollywood blacklist: "Mr. Spielberg, tear down this wall!" And Glenn Reynolds links to Total Eclipse, the greatest film you've never seen.

While I appreciate the sentiments expressed below, I respectfully request any and all third party efforts should be focused on the true candidates of Hope, Change, and Mopar, Burge-Goldstein 2008:

(Pretty cool motion tracking though, which allows embedding anyone's name into zooming and panning video. Make your own, here!)

Two guesses as to how this video ends:

(Back story here; lots more fun with Winnie and friends, here. And many more videos, here.)

Related: The original Dukakis in the tank ad from 1988 can be found here--judging by the nuanced headline written by the person who uploaded it, I don't think he was a fan of the ad's message.

Recently, I linked to Jack Shafer's article in Slate, declaring Advantage: Michael Crichton:

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled "Mediasaurus," in which he prophesied the death of the mass media--specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. "Vanished, without a trace," he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances--"artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page"--swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

* * *

As we pass his prediction's 15-year anniversary, I've got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It's gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren't going extinct tomorrow, Crichton's original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

Ever since dreaming up the "Silicon Graffiti" series last year, I had wanted to do a segment on Alvin & Heidi Toffler's "Third Wave" thesis; particularly since I had taped their segment on C-Span's Booknotes program in 1995. As I attempt to illustrate in the above video, the clashing of a Second Wave, industrial-era institution like Big Media with the Blogosphere, a purely Third Wave phenomenon, is one of the reasons why Old Media are slowly going the way the dinosaurs (and this is but one of many death rattles).

Fortunately, as I noted in an earlier segment, they've already built their own Jurassic Park!

(And speaking of earlier segments, click here for older editions of the show.)

From the home office deep inside the Stonecutters' headquarters, a look at conspiracy theories from the era of JFK, up to 9/11 and the current election year, and from General Jack D. Ripper to Rosie O'Donnell and Reverends Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger.

You can see longer clips of some of the more recent players here. The complete edition of Peter Robinson's recent interview with Camelot and the Cultural Revolution author James Piereson can be found at National Review Online.

The clip of NBC's Andrea Mitchell referring to Obama having to "figure out a way to get a fair vote if he's the nominee in those red states" with their "Katherine Harris-type election officials" is available at Eyeblast.tv. (I really wanted to include a snippet of this clip from last year of Mitchell's hard-hitting detective skills in action, but in order to bring things in under 10 minutes for inclusion on YouTube, it ended up on the virtual cutting room floor.) And the December 2001 Reason article on the new breed of General Jack Rippers and their fluidic obsessions is here.

This episode is a sequel of sorts to the segment earlier this month titled "Radical Chic: Frozen In Amber"; this is a slightly broader view of a related but larger topic, but you'll certainly recognize a couple of the same players.

And for the rest of the earlier Silicon Graffiti videos, tune in here.

Taking a cue from a post by Tom Maguire of the Just One Minute blog, and following up on my weekend post on Sen. Tom Harkin, I look at the ongoing attempts by the far left to delegitimize Senator John McCain's service in Vietnam, several of which have come from the same people who told us that another ex-Navy officer, who, by the way, served in Vietnam, was the man to vote for in 2004. As Tom wrote on Thursday:

Times contributer Matt Bai will have a long NY Times magazine entry this Sunday. Apparently it is an upscale attempt to Swiftboat John McCain (You know I use that term mockingly) by de-legitimizing his wartime experience. My advice to Attack Dems intent on this path - have fun storming the castle!

And just yesterday, as I was putting this video to bed, Ed Morrissey spotted yet another example of what seems to be a trend, coordinated or not.

(Earlier Silicon Graffiti videos can be found here.)

I've been meaning to link to this all week--on Tuesday's edition of Breitbart TV's B-Cast live Internet news show, hosts Scott Baker and Liz Stephans ran the recent Top Ten Hillary Clinton Moments edition of my Silicon Graffiti video podcast series to close out the show. Skip ahead to the 82:00 minute mark to check out their set-up.

After my video ran, Liz Stephans made a great observation: note the contrast in Hillary's tone in the first two clips. Number ten on the list begins with Hillary's introductory campaign video on YouTube, with featured a beautifully lit set, a perfectly coifed and made-up Hillary, and her crisp, regal, I've got this election in the bag, and we all know it delivery.

The clip in number nine was shot on the campaign stump almost a year and a half later, and features a very different Hillary, shouting until hoarse and thrashing frantically into the wind. That's all you need to know about the Tuzla-sized gap between her initial expectations and results so far.

From the home office In Little Rock, Arkansas...

By the way, the rather expansive new American flag which appears in the video is for sale here. Here's where you can find the Hillary as Indiana Jones video, and the Hillary as Norma Desmond clip. And the 3:00 AM mash-up in the video is here.

Previous Silicon Graffiti episodes can be found here.

The Black Panthers and Weathermen (aka Weather Underground) were anarchistic paramilitary far left groups from the late 1960s, whose ties crossed at least once in 1970. They're resurfacing again though in a surprising place: each has been referenced via Barack Obama's presidential campaign, particlarly the latter group. Back in February, the Politico's Ben Smith noted:

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district's influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they're better known nationally as two of the most notorious--and unrepentant--figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.

"I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress," said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. "[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor."

Obama and Palmer "were both there," he said.

Obama's connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their home--part of a campaign courtship--reflects more extensive interaction than has been previously reported.

And Tom Maguire also uncovered another connection:

The Obama/Ayers soundbite is this: Obama and Ayers (a professor of education) worked together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge for several years in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to reform Chicago's public schools. The extent of their relationship is not clear, since Obama has been opaque on this topic both in a televised debate and at his website. However, Ayers was instrumental in founding the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Obama was the group's first chairman, so there is something being concealed there.

And it's not like Hillary Clinton is without sin in this department, herself.

(Earlier Silicon Graffiti videos can be found here.)

Just in time for the results from the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, here's the latest Silicon Graffiti. It's a reminder that sometimes, in the never-ending search for the next JFK, you have to toss the old one--and his wife--overboard.

(Previous editions of Silicon Graffiti can be found here.)

Rock & Roll has a museum in Cleveland; and Jazz has a de facto museum in Manhattan's Lincoln Center. What does the traditional news industry opening a museum of its own in Washington DC say about its viability in the age of Blogs and the Web?

Complete with cameo appearances by Mick Jagger and Orson Welles, my latest Silicon Graffiti video is online, using old media's recently completed museum honoring--who else?--themselves as a launching point:

The video references the nifty EPIC 2014 multimedia presentation from 2004, which you can view in its entirety on its homepage, and more of my own videos can be found here.

(Bumped to top.)

About a week ago, I spotted an interesting contrast in the widely disparate tone of how two similar news stories were covered by their local TV stations:

Note the extremely positive style in which the local TV news station in Blue State generally "anti-War" Bobos In Paradise Santa Rosa, California reported the story of an elderly Army vet who defended himself against a robbery attempt. Then compare it how one now infamous ex-reporter in the generally more conservative area of Dallas reported the story of another elderly Army vet who defended himself against multiple robbery attempts.

The contrasting styles indicate, among other things, the folly of the remaining pockets of the media who claim to be "objective", unbiased, and generally above the fray. The above videos also illustrate that tone, language and context are all key parts of crafting the news, whether it's for print, TV or radio, as well consideration of how the news will be received by the local audience. (Hence the additional outrage over former Dallas-area journalist Rebecca Aguilar's badgering tone.) And all of those elements are based on the skill and life experiences of the producer, editor and/or reporter, who brings together the writing, interviewing, and soundbites, whether they're printed quotes or A/V clips.

That's the subject of our latest Silicon Graffiti video podcast, complete with a quote from Glenn Reynolds, and a cameo appearance by Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV, via an excerpt from this clip.

(More video blogging found here, incidentally.)

Late Update 1/15/09: After a large initial flurry of traffic and then months of quiet but study activity, this video had quite a checkered history in the waning months of 2008. You can read about the efforts to banish it from YouTube, here.

Mark Steyn writes:

Jeepers, will all business during the Clinton Administration be transacted at 3 AM? Is it some union-negotiated flex-time deal? “Home foreclosures mounting”? We’d better wake the President.

As Jim Geraghty, or possibly someone else at NRO recently noted, the ideal response from a prospective President McCain would be to seriously ream anyone on his staff who wakes him at 3:00 AM over a domestic financial "crisis"--there's a reason why they call the time when the sun is visible "bankers' hours". (The acceptable alternative response would be, "Call Kudlow, dammit!", but that's a whole 'nother story.)

But hey, like I said, it's always 3:00 AM somewhere...

By the time of his death in 2005 at the venerable age of 98, Philip Johnson was arguably America's best known architect, having designed his famed "Glass House" in 1949, and worked with Mies van der Rohe on Mies's Seagram Building a few years later. The former was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1997; the latter dubbed "Building of the Millennium" by the New York Times.

But Johnson's puckish demeanor in his later years, which earned him decades of good cheer from fellow Manhattan elites, hid a dark journey through the liberal fascist politics of the 1930s, which culminated in his cheering on the Nazis as they marched through Poland in 1939. "We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle", he would write to a friend at the time.

At the start of the 1930s, Johnson was an admirer of the socialist-leaning architects of Germany's Bauhaus, as he founded the newly born Museum of Modern Art's architectural department, and helped put modern architecture on the map in the US. Apparently after witnessing a Hitler rally in Potsdam in 1933, Johnson was immediately attracted to the Nazis. That moment sent Johnson on a seemingly strange journey: shortly thereafter, he would leave MoMA to seek employment with first Huey Long and then Father Coughlin, before ultimately winding up cheering the Nazis on at the start of WWII.

During that same period though, while Johnson openly admired the Nazis, he befriended the last director of the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe, even as the Nazis were shuttering the design school's doors. Returning to MoMA in the 1950s and establishing himself, via his famed Glass House, as a known architect in his own right, as Hilton Kramer noted in the mid-1990s, and Anne Applebaum shortly after Johnson's death, Johnson did a near-thorough job of tossing his radical past down the memory hole. At the least, most of his fellow Manhattan elites didn't lose too much sleep over it.

And yet, comparing Johnson's past with the lost history of the 1930s described in Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, in retrospect Johnson comes across as a sort of dark version of Woody Allen's Zelig character, appearing alongside several of the fascist left's most important figures in both the US and Europe during the Depression.

(More video blogging found here, incidentally.)

While it lacks the staggering production values and stentorian dialogue readings of the finest Fred Spencer Productions, the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, our in-house video blog, is online. It analyzes and breaks down the creepy 9/11-ish vibe of a couple of advertisements, the first a Starbucks ad that actually ran in Manhattan less than a year after September 11th (here's our concurrent blog post from our first year). And the second, a much more recent viral video for a (possibly fictitious?) Dutch travel agency with close to a million and half views on YouTube and at least one appearance on the cable news channels, which is where I first saw it at the start of this month.

(Past episodes of Silicon Graffiti can be found here.)

That's how Foreign Policy's Mike Boyer reports the conversation went at a recent Council on Foreign Relations event in DC involving representatives of both the Hillary and McCain camps:

After Mara Rudman, who is advising Hillary Clinton, very briefly addressed the issue of Clinton's foreign policy experience, [Randy Scheunemann, who is overseeing foreign policy issues for John McCain's campaign], chimed in with:

"Please keep running those 3:00 A.M. ads about who you want to answer the phone, because we like those."

Happy to oblige:

Because it's always 3:00 AM, somewhere!

Update: The Gipper certainly understood inter-party campaign jujitsu.

Several pundits have noted that Hillary's new "3:00 a.m." ad could be the perfect ad for John McCain. So for the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti video blog, we mashed it into just that:

And for those who want to link to the mash-up itself, here it is:

Update: Welcome Power Line readers! Elsewhere in the Blogosphere, Jammie Wearing Fool notes, "Girl in Hillary's 3 a.m. Ad Actually an Obama Supporter".

More: Ann Althouse and Michelle Malkin dissect SNL's parody of the "3:00 a.m." video.

(Bumped to top.)

(Bumped to top--Ed)

In between the audio work for the weekly XM show, here's a short video I shot on the joys of green screen and DIY video, and the groundwork that's being laid for the eventual successors to the stodgy old network news:

For some background, tips on getting started, and links to the individual clips embedded in the video, there's an accompanying Blogcritics article as well.

And if you missed our previous Silicon Graffiti video (focusing on Ezra Levant and the now infamous Alberta Human Rights Commission), just click here.

At Pajamas, we believe in covering all of the election returns, no matter how obscure the precinct:

(Hey no worse than Florida voters, who can't figure out that they've already had their primary, last week...)

Update: Real results here.

Well, that's what my fellow Blogway Boy says, at least:

In-between recording some--hopefully!--serious Super Tuesday material for this Thursday's Pajamas Media's PJM Political show on XM Satellite Radio, I also sat in, along with Roger Simon, on a shoot by Pajamas' video maestro Mark Anderson. I'm not sure which of us is Mort and which of us is Fred, but here you go:

Since I'll be busy much of the day assembling the next edition of PJM Political, hopefully this will hold you over in-between posts:

Here's a link to the Pajamas article the video references.

The following video is a Rashomon-like experience: poignant look at Red State elites on the eve of a tumultuous election year? Hagiographic inadvertent infomercial? Self-indulgent holiday video? All of the above?

You make the call!

Secrets of XM revealed!

(A big thanks to Joe Mathieu of XM's POTUS '08 Channel, for giving me a tour of the facilities on the day before Thanksgiving.)

Back in October, I visited the Arlington, Texas Guitar Show. I finally had a chance to come up for air from the PJM Political audio stuff to finish the short video I shot and edited of the action in the main showroom. (And yes, that's me playing assorted electric and acoustic guitars on the backing track):

With apologies to Lorne Michaels...

Tune in weekly to #130 on your XM dial, and anytime, here.

With the return of Dan Rather, an article I wrote for the September issue of the New Individualist magazine seems especially timely. It's titled "Atlas Mugged: How a Gang of Scrappy, Individual Bloggers Broke the Stranglehold of the Mainstream Media" , and I certainly hope you'll stop by and give it a read. It features quotes from interviews conducted especially for the piece with Glenn Reynolds, James Lileks, and also Shannon Love of the Chicago Boyz Website, who provided loads of great material on the birth of mass media.

For better or worse, it was also a chance to shoot some video, obviously inspired by the look and feel of Hot Air's "Vent" series:

The PR firm that represents Fretlight contacted me last month and asked if I wanted to write a review of the Fretlight guitar teaching system. When their CEO showed up with a guitar in his hands yesterday to demonstrate, I thought it would also be a great excuse to shoot some video: