What The Echo Chamber Can Provide
Addressing the market demand in the previous post, here is what I tentatively see as what The Echo Chamber can provide to the market:
* The Echo Chamber explores the sociology of the media and brings a deeper understanding to the media's role of creating meaning and shaping the cultural consciousness.
* Provides an opportunity to investigate the media bias culture wars in the context of the build-up to the war in Iraq.
* Can be used as an outreach tool for individuals to bridge the polarized culture gap -- Grievances with the mainstream media provides a common ground for conservatives and liberals to come together and have further political discussions that bring a deeper understanding to each other's perspectives.
* Provides a unique way to reanalyze the moral arguments for the war in Iraq that have been disguised by a strained set of International Legal justifications.
* By encouraging intimate post-film, community-building discussions, then this project can provide a context for developing meaningful physical and emotional connections.
* By incorporating spiritual perspectives and stimulating dialogue, then this project provides a broader range of emotional satisfaction that is often lacking from political involvement.
* Provides an opportunity to evolve the culture beyond mindless infotainment by presenting an ideologically-diverse set of arguments that encourage critical thinking skills and stimulate various lines of psychological development.
* Using the Bush Administration's International Legal justification for the Iraq war as a vehicle, the film juxtaposes the ethnocentric unilateralist perspectives with the multilateral "Global Citizen" perspectives in order to further explore the political, legal and diplomatic dimensions of this debate that the media has failed to seriously investigate.
MetaThought Productions offers multimedia outreach tools that expand consciousness and stimulate dialogue about the media and current affairs. The Echo Chamber documentary is the key product that discusses the mainstream media's role in shaping public opinion during the build-up to the war in Iraq. It offers a broad spectrum of perspectives and explores the sociological and economic factors that influence the way in which the field of journalism filters information.
Media Sociology
Media Bias Culture War
Bridging the Culture Gap
Community-Building Opportunity
Cultural Evolution
Legal Arguments for War
Moral Arguments for War
Combining Film and Internet Communications Mediums
Media Sociology
The mainstream media shapes political discourse in ways that are often unseen, and is therefore perceived to have an underlying political bias. By exploring the sociology of the media, The Echo Chamber brings a deeper understanding to the combination of micro and macro structural variables that influence the character of news coverage.
By interviewing 15 journalists, 4 media critics, 3 journalism professors, 7 think tank scholars, 4 international lawyers, 4 retired government analysts and 7 other perspectives, this project explores how the media creates meaning and shapes cultural consciousness.
The project is deeply rooted in academic theory, and uses many of the insights from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's Journalistic Field Theory to comprehensively incorporate a broad range of points of view.
Media Bias Culture War
The Echo Chamber provides an opportunity to investigate the political bias "culture war" in the context of the media's pre-war performance. The build-up to the military intervention provides an interesting anomaly to the conservative claims that a "Liberal Media Bias" drives television news coverage.
The Media Research Center insists that the mass media "slant reports in favor of the liberal position on issues." But after Democrats and Republicans agreed on authorizing the Iraq war in October, then the media became an "Echo Chamber" to the Executive Branch's countdown towards war. Journalists viewed the war as inevitable and consequently dismissed as irrelevant the contradictory evidence from the United Nations and skeptical domestic and international public opinion.
Repeated claims of liberal bias have created a distrust of the objective mainstream news media, and increased the demand for a more partisan press. This project can help restore a degree of trust within mainstream media while also emphasizing the importance of independent and alternative analyses.
Bridging the Culture Gap
The Echo Chamber can be used as an outreach tool for individuals to bridge the polarized culture gap between liberals and conservatives. Grievances with the mainstream media provide a common ground for conservatives and liberals to come together and have further political discussions that bring a deeper understanding to each other's perspectives.
The documentary will juxtapose conservative, liberal and progressive viewpoints on the media that will create an engaging tension and will encourage critical thinking. There is a grain of truth in every perspective, and this project explores the common ground and discovers the points of departure between the various perspectives.
This project will ultimately bring more understanding between the opposite ends of a polarized political environment. It will also explain the strengths and weaknesses of the mainstream media.
Community-Building Opportunity
Our culture is interconnected mentally and electronically, but our society is also very isolated when it comes to meaningful physical, spiritual and emotional connections. By encouraging intimate community-building discussions after film screenings, then this project can provide a context for developing meaningful connections.
This project contains a number of emotionally-charged issues regarding the mainstream media and the Bush Administration's foreign policy towards Iraq that will help stimulate discussion. It also incorporates perspectives from spiritual leaders that will add an extra dimension to the post-film dialogues.
The film will also provide an opportunity for individuals to find common ground and to discover their points of departure from the attitudes of their friends and family. By stimulating engaging dialogue, then this project provides a broader range of emotional satisfaction that is often lacking from political involvement.
Cultural Evolution
The Echo Chamber also provides an opportunity to evolve the culture beyond mindless infotainment by presenting an ideologically-diverse set of arguments that encourage critical thinking skills and stimulate various lines of psychological development.
This project provides a catalyst for cultural evolution based upon the sociological insight that our culture is dynamic. There is a perception that the Red State/Blue State dichotomy is an unchangeable cultural phenomenon. Therefore, politicians statically frame issues according to the costs and benefits as measured by electoral politics.
The competition for votes often results in a political consensus on vital issues of the day, such as sustainability issues, corporate-influence on public policy, and a foreign policy that's in our economic but not security interests. A two-party consensus limits the spectrum of the debate within the media where non-partisan expert perspectives are often excluded from the national political discourse.
Sociological theory shows how our culture is not as static as politicians treat it, and The Echo Chamber uses the mainstream media as a context for Republicans and Democrats to expand the bounds of debate over vital issues of the day. Post-film discussions will create opportunities for belief systems to be challenged, and for growth and understanding to occur. This will cumulatively result in cultural evolution and an increased demand for more meaningful entertainment that explores the complex and vital issues of the day.
Legal Arguments for War
The Bush Administration continues to insist that the military intervention in Iraq was legally justified. Three International Lawyers concede in interviews that the United States' legal argument presented to the United Nations was not sufficient under International Law, and that a second resolution was required to explicitly authorize the military intervention.
The Bush Administration claimed that they were upholding previous UN resolutions, but it was the perspective of the other Security Council member states before the war that the US was violating the UN charter. The Democratic leadership did not take a strong position on the legal arguments presented to the UN, and therefore the media never seriously investigated the war's legitimacy based upon the merits of the opposition arguments that given by France and supported by a majority of the security council.
The media has failed to distinguish that the United States never presented a legal case of pre-emptive action to the United Nations, which means that the intervention was never framed as an act of self-defense to the diplomatic community. By not making this distinction, the media has allowed a cultural assumption to proliferate that the Iraq war was a pre-emptive action.
This lack of distinction has allowed deceptive statements to be made to the domestic population such as "America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country." This phrase was used by President Bush and Vice President Cheney over 60 times during the Presidential campaign, and proved to be a vital misperception that allowed the Bush campaign to criticize Kerry's "global test" comments over 80 times.
It has also created a post-war environment where Republicans have launched an aggressive attack campaign designed discredit the United Nations in order to justify their foreign policy agenda. This has further isolated the United States from the rest of the world, and created domestic opposition to participation in multilateral institutions.
Using the Bush Administration's International Legal justification for the Iraq war as a vehicle, The Echo Chamber juxtaposes the ethnocentric unilateralist perspectives with the multilateral "Global Citizen" perspectives. The Echo Chamber explores the political, legal and diplomatic dimensions of this debate that the media has failed to seriously investigate.
Moral Arguments for War
The Echo Chamber provides a unique way to reanalyze the moral arguments for the Iraq war that have been disguised by a strained set of International Legal justifications.
The failure of the media to investigate the arguments presented to the United Nations has created a cultural assumption of legality, which has allowed the Bush Administration to focus solely on the moral and humanitarian justifications for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Within this context, a representative from Human Rights Watch argues that Iraq should not be considered a humanitarian intervention while two pro-war conservatives argue that the immoral actions of Saddam Hussein should trump any constraints from International Law. This is a debate that needs to be further explored based upon the merits of the arguments.
Combining Film and Internet Communications Mediums
The Echo Chamber has created an ambitious set of goals that will probably not achieved within the constraints of one 90-minute film. Therefore, many video vignettes will be added as DVD extras that will be able to be used as teaching aides.
The project's scope will also expand beyond the practical limits of the film medium by leveraging the communications power of the Internet. An expansive website has been set up at http://www.EchoChamberProject.com that provides access to the all of the interview transcripts and other references to the media's pre-war coverage.
The most influential power of this product is not from the content of the documentary itself, but instead within the meaning and understanding that is created from the post-film conversations.
