History

I aggregated the timelines for the Pre-Production, Production and Post-Production Phases of The Echo Chamber Project for a paper that Dr. Cline's is working on.

Below is an overview of how the film came about and where it has been so far. It also traces the evolution of the collaborative aspects of the post-production.

More details about the pre-production phases can be found in The Origins of The Echo Chamber Project as well in the Baltimore City Paper cover story written by Charles Cohen.

More details about the actual production can be found by reading the interviews that have been transcribed.

There are links to blog entries covering the big post-production highlights in the timeline, and more details can be found by sifting through the blog archives...

Dr. Cline asked me to give him some more background information as to the events leading up to why I decided to start The Echo Chamber documentary project for a paper he's working on.

I told a lot of this same information to Charles Cohen when he was profiling my wife and I for the cover story on this project that was published in the Baltimore City Paper a year ago. But not all of it made it into the final story, and so I thought I'd share it here as well.

At what point did you say to yourself: "I have to do something."
Going back to April 20th, 2002, I had attended one of the first anti-war rallies in DC before the Bush Administration kicked off their PR campaign to sell the Iraq war 4 months later. This is where I heard Phyllis Bennis from the Institute of Policy Studies speak for the first time.

After this, I saw Scott Ritter's name come up a number of times online and that's why I went to go hear him talk on August 22nd when he came through Baltimore. Ritter accurately predicted that the Bush Administration was going to go to war in Iraq, and that they were going to use WMD to sell it to the American public.

Four days later, I was on vacation when I saw highlights of Cheney launching the PR campaign to sell the war in Iraq. Ritter was so eerily correct in predicting what was going to happen that I started recording C-SPAN when I returned home in September and October of 2002. I had a very strong hunch from Ritter that the Bush Administration was going to sell the war based upon questionable intelligence...

As I reflect on how this documentary started and where it has ended up, I notice how much it has evolved. I have been writing up synopses and talking to a number of people about the project, and I realize that there is some confusion about the motivations and intentions of The Echo Chamber.

Is the film is going to criticize the politics of the selling the war to the American people and serve as a thinly-veiled attack on President Bush? Or is this a serious academic investigation of the downfalls of objective mainstream journalism?

ORIGINAL MOTIVATIONS

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.