Educational Media Reviews Online

Live discussion (with pre-recorded clips) on a California college campus featuring three panelists – Marc Herold of University of New Hampshire, Sunil Sharma of Dissident Voice News Service, and radio journalist Davey D – who discuss and assess recent mass media misrepresentations of civilian casualties (“collateral damage”) in the war in Afghanistan, detentions of political prisoners after September 11th, and repression of government criticism. Rolled-in footage from CNN Nightly News, illustrated with maps and graphs, demonstrates military misinformation and lack of disclosure from Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among others. This is supplemented by student-on-the-street interviews and questions from the audience.

If you’re going to film a panel discussion in real time, you’d better have known or engaging speakers. This has neither. The talking figures are projected against a background of a blue chain link fence and – inexplicably - five distracting television monitors projecting unrelated footage. While the integrated clips provide relief and illustrate the speakers’ points about mass media spin and government doublespeak, the overall tone is naïve and painfully obvious.

Not recommended. I can’t image why CSUMB would elect to distribute this already dated program. For better or worse, these issues have been far outstripped by the excesses of the Iraqi war - in particular, the international debate on weapons of mass destruction, in the context of the Bush administration’s evasions and misinterpretations. The three panelists do not engage each other, are not moderated in curtailing their comments, and don’t provide fresh insights. Viewers would be better served accessing Bill Moyers’ devastating NOW episode in which a young Afghan-American woman returns to her family’s village to find it inadvertently destroyed by American “precision” bombs.