Archive for the 'Online videos' Category
Introducing Freespeech.org – a leading online documentary channel, which buys and screens quality documentaries for its 130 million plus audience. Everyday, FSTV presents fiercely independent documentaries, experimental films and short videos. Enriching and inspiring, these programmes feature hard-to-find voices and perspectives. The documentary subjects range from criminal justice systems to women’s shelters; or from globalization, through genetic engineering to international peacekeeping. Free Speech TV broadcasts 2 new hours of its “Alternative Voices” strand every day.
In a four-part special series, “News War”, Frontline examines the political, cultural, legal, and economic forces challenging the American news media today. Through interviews with key figures in print, broadcast and electronic media over the past four decades, and with behind-the-scenes access to some of today’s most important news organizations, the documentary film traces the recent history of American journalism. It tries to explain media history from the Nixon administration’s attacks on the media to the post-Watergate popularity of the press, to the new challenges presented by the war on terror, and also covering other global forces now changing – and challenging – the role of the American press.
You can watch all four parts on the Frontline website.
Last week, Channel 4 aired a documentary - ”The Great Global Warming Swindle” – which aims to discredit environmentalists and climate change scientists, alleging that they are part of a corrupt, self-centered political movement, whose only goal is to keep research funds flowing. Said environmentalists and scientists are now furious, and the film’s allegations are being debated worldwide.
In the film, “climate change denier” scientists, interviewed by director Martin Durkin of WagTV, argue that global warming is not caused by increased carbon dioxide in the air, but rather by the sun’s fairly inconsistent and unpredictable activity. Plus, we are told that vulcanoes, dying vegetation and oceans release much more CO2 into the atmosphere than industrialisation, so the alarm-raising conclusions of the environmental movement are misleading. The film’s argument that the use of apocalypic messages is a key ingredient of successful civil society campaigns is supported by Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, who says he left the organisation over a similar dramatisation incident.
Buy the film from Amazon.co.uk
Continue reading ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’
A powerful American documentary about child molestation is available for online viewing at the PBS Frontline portal. Filmmaker Joe Cultrera explores the case of his brother, who was one of the approx. 10,000 children abused by Catholic priests in the US.
14-year-old Paul was sexually abused in the 1960s by Father Joseph Birmingham (see photo), who allegedly molested nearly a hundred other children in the Boston area. The film tells the story of faith betrayed, and how Paul and the rest of the Cultrera family fought back against a scandal that continues to afflict churches across America.
Paul kept his secret for nearly 30 years, until he decided to finally confront the church and launch his own investigation into whether the Archdiocese of Boston had covered up allegations against Birmingham by moving him from parish to parish.
Watch the film on PBS Frontline, or read more about the story in the Boston Globe. 
Just one week after it appeared on YouTube, a 5 min. short film on the history of the web has become one of the world’s top internet videos. Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, created the compelling film “The Machine is Us/ing Us” to chronicle the evolution of the internet as a visual aid to use in class.
The video (available here) traces the development of human communication from handwriting, through digital text and HTML to technology that currently allows anyone to publish and share whatever they want without knowing the code. Wesch celebrates human achievement but also reminds us that we need to rethink issues such as “authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, and ourselves.”
For more info, read an interview with Wesch on The Daily Reel, and check out the creator’s Digital Ethnography blog.
The good news is that BBC and Google Video are in talks about a content deal allowing BBC content to appear legally on the video sharing pages. The details of the agreement should be released any day now.
BBC’s plan is to use Google Video as a vehicle to generate a larger international audience for its popular content, and it’s also likely that the deal will provide for a solution to the problem of illegal uploads.
According to a Guardian report, the BBC will get its own channel on the site, and revenues generated from contextual advertising would be split between the two companies. While hit shows like “Mr Bean” will be the main beneficiaries of the deal, it is widely hoped that some documentary programmes will also be included.
Read more about the copyright infringement debate on the BBC blog.
Now that the whole world is talking about climate change, watch again the 2005 BBC documentary (available on Google video for free) which adds another layer onto the discussion by looking at the phenomena of “global dimming”. The film reveals that the man-made air pollution has reduced the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth, meaning that all global warming statistics and forecasts could have been wrong. In fact, climate change could be an even greater threat than previously thought.
The death toll that global dimming may have already caused is thought to be massive. Climatologists argue that the reflection of heat has made waters in the northern hemisphere cooler. As a result, less rain has formed in key areas and crucial rainfall has failed to arrive over the Sahel in Northern Africa. The African famines of the 1970s and 1980s were caused by these failed rains, and thus Western industrialised nations are directly implicated in these tragedies. “What came out of our exhaust pipes and power stations [from Europe and North America] contributed to the deaths of a million people in Africa,” an expert says in the film.
Read the full story here.
