With their most recent undercover video investigations, independent journalists James O’Keefe and Lila Rose have set a new standard of transparency in the field of journalism — a standard I call on all media outlets — print, online, and broadcast — to adopt and to institute immediately. Within hours of releasing what the AP called “heavily edited” video footage of a high-powered NPR executive’s troubling statements with respect to the Tea Party, conservatives, and Jewish control of the media, Mr. O’Keefe then released to the public the full, unedited two-hour video of the entire conversation. Another New Media pioneer, Lila Rose, also released the full video of her undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood.

While the biased AP apparently only whips out the term “heavily edited” when the institutional left is under fire, it’s difficult to disagree with them on principle, especially when we live in a world where on a daily basis the network nightly news programs, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and every facet of the MSM broadcast and publishing world release reports no less “heavily edited” than Rosa and O’Keefe’s initial video releasse. However, unlike Rose and O’Keefe, the mainstream media never allows the public to view the full, unedited material in order to judge the full context for ourselves.

This can and must end today.

With New Media once again leading away, let’s start a new era of responsible journalism that we’ll call The Rose/O’Keefe Standard of Journalistic Transparency, where the insidious practice of “heavily edited” interviews and reporting finally comes to an end. If the mainstream media is as devoted to transparency, truth, and context as James O’Keefe, here are some examples of how it can work….

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The last thing I was worrying about was that The Other Guys would be too preachy.  Sure, Will Ferrell has a long history of deep, thought-provoking critiques of society and culture, so that should have been my big concern.  Also subtitles.  And having the last shot of the film be the word “Fin” superimposed over the freeze-framed image of a crying child alone on a beach symbolizing death or something. 

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You know, sometimes you just want to go, have a drink or two, or three, or ten, and then sit in a movie theater and tune out the seemingly endless parades of nimrods, pinkos and sanctimonious deadbeats who make up so much of our society today.  You just want some guys to come on the screen and to do and say some funny stuff.  Maybe you want an explosion or two, perhaps a gratuitous shower scene – strike that, as shower scenes are never gratuitous.  Unless it’s a dude.  Or Kathy Bates.

The point is the last thing you want after a Dos XX prep and handing over $11.75 each for yourself and your life partner/designated driver is for a bunch of Hollywood half-wits to stop the fun to give you a PowerPoint briefing on their insights into modern politics – without even the PowerPoint.  And it appears that this is exactly what The Other Guys intends to do. (more…)

Even in the vast annals of Hollywood sycophantic suckuppery, the recent UK Guardian profile of Oliver Stone by Carol Cadwalladr is in a class by itself.  It is a fawning treatise hailing everything about Ollie, from his unique artistic vision to his unique attitude toward self-love – and, unfortunately, I’m not referring here to his narcissism.  Yet this hagiography still provides some intriguing clues about a question that arises every year or so when Stone puts out a movie:  Why does this pretentious clown still get taken seriously?

I think it’s because entertainment journalists seem to think he’s hot.

I mean, after all, Stone “is a man’s man… a sort of latter-day Ernest Hemingway, an action man with a reputation for women and drugs who won the Purple Heart for bravery in Vietnam “

Wow, a Purple Heart “for bravery” – glad we have the MSM’s famous layers of fact-checkers and editors hard at work making sure reporters don’t make basic, embarrassing errors.  But I digress.

The overriding theme of the profile – and Stone’s own personal narrative – is simply how hunky the auteur is.  Whether he’s palling around with Castro and Chavez or simply talking about his Daddy issues – which, trust me, are nowhere near as terrifying as his Mommy issues – we learn that Ollie is all-man, all the time. (more…)

Normally I don’t like making fun of Columbia journalism students, because it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, if the barrel were full of Columbia journalism students.

And that would be very wrong.

But when I saw this video, I couldn’t resist. It’s of a panel, in which students are pointing out how predictable cover letters won’t help you get a job in the post j-school world. So what would? How about a rap?

And so it begins, as one student unleashes his inner Jay-Z, listing in all earnestness a lengthy promise of his many qualifications.

Roll tape, roll-tapers:

So, no surprise: the student raps benign pap that his professors and like-minded dorm-rats would applaud – from railing against complacency, to never losing touch with “his humanity.” But I’ll repeat the part the kid really wanted them to hear:

“There’s no need to hear crazy, or create a false sense of parity, like Fox News and Hannity.” (more…)

A couple of weeks ago I was in New York, meeting with network television producers about a series they wanted to run about a story my production team and I have been reporting for more than five years: the narco-insurgency currently wreaking havoc on the U.S. and Mexico.

Just as we all sat down around the conference table, my cell phone rang. Given the importance of the meeting, I normally would have let the call go to voice mail, but when I looked at the number I knew I had to pick it up. This person would not be calling unless it was an absolute emergency. I opened the phone and didn’t even get the “Hello” out of my mouth before a shaken and somewhat scared voice said, “Rusty when can you be here?”

The caller was my most trusted source in Mexico. Slightly stunned by the abrupt nature of the call, I responded inquisitively, “Pretty soon, I should wrap up here in New York in a couple of days, why?”

“We have to talk right away, we have a huge problem down here and you’re in the middle of it,” he exclaimed. (more…)

Okay Class, stop sniffing your Sharpies in a futile attempt to reach a state of intoxication and try to take notes using that writing instrument and what brain cells you have left. Remember, if you can, that information you believe to be useless is, indeed, of no value whatsoever if you are unable to apply it in real-life situations, or at the very least for pc gaming “cheats.” Otherwise your very existence is no better than a work of fiction and bears no resemblance to any human being, past or present, living or dead. (Or in your cases, “living dead” or zombie, if you prefer, or the more inclusive term “differently animated.”)

Aristotle, in Poetics, slops the pearl that “art” is a “representation of reality.” By this definition, presentations of the creative sort contain something, if only a je ne sais quois, that can be recognized as a reflection of the human condition and the historical present. Reach back in time to The Epic of Gilgamesh, and out of the cuneiform pressed in clay comes the tale of a king’s hubris, lust for immortality, and ultimate understanding of his place in the world. Fast forward and select at random. “The Counsels of the Bird” by Rumi, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest,  Eliot’s “Quartets,” “The Short Happy Life Of Francis MacComber” by Hemingway.  Consider Andy Warhol’s body of work as a commentary on the superficiality of modern culture; look at the content of  films, popular songs and television programs, comic strips and “illustrated novels,” with their wide diversity of theme and thought.  All these arts, of varying degrees of cultural significance, may be seen to generally adhere to Aristotle’s commentary. (more…)

Okay Class, today’s Lecture is on “Text and Subtext”, that is to say, for those of you who managed to make “A”s in all your Language Arts classes without actually learning anything of value, the lecture is about Stated and Implied Themes and the ways and means by which a reader or audience is involved in what is expected to be one message while actually being inculcated in another, or various other, messages.  Be sure to take notes as otherwise your lives will be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, and most especially in the likely event that, having taken said notes, you never look at them or think about the points therein again.  Take it from a Doctor of Separate Reality.

We begin, as we often do, with “things we fail to realize”.  First, regardless of the extent to which we have absorbed a kind of reflexive, “hip” atheism in our lives without giving it any thought whatsoever, we have still grown accustomed to the idea of Vox Pop. The meaning of this term has undergone various insidious transformations over time, and especially in contemporary culture, which, yes, we fail to realize.  Vox Pop is short for the Latin, “vox populi” and originates in the phrase, “vox populi, vox dei“, or, “the voice of the people is the voice of God”.  Stop groaning and considering the threat of lawsuits as we are not talking about a Supreme Deity, except as metaphor for the ceaseless demands of particular populations to be given anything and everything they want at any time, preferably at the expense of others.  When the group wearing “Che” t-shirts stops cheering and stomping their feet to the tune of “We Will Rock You” we will continue.  (more…)

This week’s Washington Times column:

On April 15, I joined hundreds of thousands of everyday Americans across the nation at the tax day “tea party” protests. I wasn’t told to go there by Fox News or by billionaires or millionaires. But what if I had?

The mainstream media and the Democratic Party – one and the same these days – spent much of the last week furiously attacking the grass-roots tea party protest movement as somehow illegitimate – or worse.

Days before the uniformly peaceful and patriotic gatherings took place, Homeland Security czar Janet Napolitano conveniently issued a bizarre report slandering military veterans and assorted right-leaning groups as racist, homegrown terrorism threats.

News anchors resorted to prime-time “tea-bagging” jokes in frequent attempts to mock the participants’ grievances. On Keith Olbermann’s hate crime of a show on MSNBC, Janeane Garofalo fused two memes to declare tens of thousands of Americans as “tea-bagging rednecks.” (more…)

I wanted to pop in here to let “Big Hollywood” readers know about the just-published spy thriller I wrote with my friend Keith Korman. What is it like? Well, think of an episode of “24″ written by Proust. OK, maybe not quite. But it is a thriller with a point of view. We try to keep the plot moving, while satirizing the chattering class and skewering the imbecilities of America’s political/media culture. The basic plot is that a Mahattan-based, dissolute left-wing journalist (Peter Johnson), who writes for a journal edited by a predatory and impossibly shameless editrix (Josephine von Hildebrand), is sent on a rogue mission to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist by an all-but-forgotten CIA spymaster (Stewart Banquo, of the title). Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Larry King all make cameo appearances, among many others. The book’s approach is that the best way to fight back against the mainstream-media/conventional-wisdom complex is to laugh at it.

CHAPTER ONE
The Drunk

He sat in a ramshackle office chair staring at the little red light in the video camera and let the little red video light stare right back. Sounds trickled into his head from the earpiece, the familiar theme music of the cable news show six thousand miles away and then that raspy voice from the guy who never missed the chance to ask a creampuff question:

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