August 06, 2006
news item: youtube's like any other place on the internet
From ABC News: an Al Gore satire supposedly posted by an amateur filmmaker on YouTube was actually created and posted by a GOP-affiliated PR firm.
At first blush, “An Inconvenient Spoof” seemed like a scrappy little homemade film poking fun at Gore and his anti-global warming crusade.In the movie, Gore is seen boring an army of penguins with his lecture and blaming global warming for everything, including Lindsay Lohan’s thinness.
But when the Wall Street Journal tried to find the guy who posted this film — listed on YouTube as a 29-year-old — they found the movie didn’t come from an amateur working out of his basement.
The film actually came from a slick Republican public relations firm called DCI, which just happens to have oil giant Exxon as a client.
This must some kind of basic recursive loop we’re stuck in with every new form of media.
10 PRINT “New media allows people to lie in slightly new ways”
20 PRINT “other media reveals, shockingly, that people are using the new media to lie”
30 PRINT “people learn, or fail to learn, to look critically at the new media, as, after all, it is created by people, who tend to lie”
40 PRINT “people invent new media”
50 GOTO 10
