About The Echo Chamber
Kent Bye is the 'benevolent dictator' of EchoChamberProject.com, an open-source investigative journalism project.
This project focuses on how the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts uncritically echoed the Bush Administration's Public Relations Campaign to sell the War in Iraq.
From August 26th, 2002 to March 19th, 2003, the editorial staff of these news organizations limited skeptical viewpoints and helped create a collective consciousness that war with Iraq was inevitable.
The conclusions from this collaborative research project will be incorporated and disseminated to a larger audience with The Echo Chamber documentary project.
METATHOUGHT PRODUCTIONS
By "thinking about thinking," we can become more aware of our attitudes and beliefs and then become more open to alternative perspectives.
This project intends to characterize the news that was and was not covered by the television media, and how the lack of critical voices within the daily beat coverage helped manufacture consent towards the war in Iraq.
The project also intends to identify the recurring behavioral patterns of the mainstream broadcast television news so that regular viewers can watch it with a more critical eye and non-viewers can understand how this powerful communications medium influenced the consciousness of the 30 million daily viewers.
PROJECT ORIGINS
Bye heard Scott Ritter speak in Baltimore on August 22, 2002 where Ritter claimed that the Bush Administration was determined to go to war with Iraq and that they were going to use Weapons of Mass Destruction as the pretext. Ritter was claiming that Iraq did not have any nuclear weapons and that the shelf life of the chemical and biological agents had already expired.
Ritter's warnings proved to be very prophetic of the upcoming massive propaganda campaign that would begin four days later with a speech by Vice President Dick Cheney.
Bye was inspired to document this PR campaign to sell the war by recording C-SPAN beginning in September. He then shifted his focus to the broadcast television news networks when the networks became obsessed with covering the DC sniper case beginning on October 3rd. The UN debates over determining the threshold for war became a lot harder to follow throughout October.
Bye began recording the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS and NBC from November until the war began on March 19th. He also regularly recorded PBS' Newshour, BBC World News, CNN's Wolf Blitzer, MSNBC's Countdown Iraq, and Brit Hume Reports during this pre-war time period as well as over 2000 hours of war-related news coverage.
The Echo Chamber will primarily focus on the pre-war failures of ABC, CBS and NBC.
MANIFESTING THE VISION
Bye was formerly employed as a systems engineer within the military industrial complex. He saved up enough money to quit his job and research the pre-war time period full time in September 2003.
A year later, he and cinematographer/producer Jennifer Gouvea travelled to New York City and Washington, D.C. for seven weeks to conduct a total of 44 interviews including: 15 journalists, 4 media critics, 3 journalism professors, 7 think tank scholars, 4 international lawyers, 4 retired government analysts, and 7 other perspectives.
MEDIA DEMOCRATIZATION
EchoChamberProject.com is an experiment in order to create a viable model for Democratizing the Media. One limitation to existing online collaborative research is that it is extremely efficient at gathering data, but not as effective at analyzing and deducting conclusions. In order to transition towards collaborative investigative journalism, the principles of the scientific method will also be also be combined with the open-source development model (*).
Science provides a systematic analytic procedure. Open-source provides a decentralized hierarchy of labor where many contributors provide input and feedback to the one "benevolent dictator" who exerts editorial control over the process. Hopefully this combination will provide a closer approximation to the verifiable-by-fact "truth" than the existing "He Said / She Said" standard of journalistic objectivity.
PARTICIPATE IN THE FEEDBACK LOOP OF THE ELECTRONIC AGE
With over 40 hours of unique interview material in hand, Bye is soliciting the help of citizen journalists to help transcribe these interviews.
The text of these interviews and conclusions from this collaborate research project will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License. Derivative writings using this source material are strongly encouraged as long as the Echo Chamber Project is appropriately cited as the source.
This website also intends to delegate various research tasks to interested members of society. The results will be publicly available and will hopefully become a useful tool for researching this pre-war time period.
The primary product of the research from this project will be a documentary entitled, The Echo Chamber. This will serve to disseminate the findings of this project to a much wider audience. It will also hopefully reverse Bye's current negative income flow.
NOTES:
* More information on the open-source development model can be found at OpenSource.org.
* Eric Steven Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" gives a detailed anthropological study of the open-source movement that helped inspire some of the logistics of this project.
