Thursday, August 19 9:00 PM & Tuesday, August 24 7:45 PM
Brian Coffey
Documentary 16mm 6:00 2004
The political demonstration against the US war with Iraq that occurred on March 27, 2003 in New York City. Images of the media and state juxtapose with the silent soundtrack as they collide in order to create disparate definitions and contextualization of acts of dissent.
M20 THE WORLD STILL SAYS NO TO WAR
Chicago Indymedia Collective
Documentary Video 6:00 2004 Chicago
What do you get when you mix radical cheerleaders, marching bands, anarchists, and thousands of riot police? You get a peace protest Chicago style.
WMD: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
Danny Schechter
Documentary Video 104:00 2004 World Premiere
"There were two wars going on in Iraq - one was fought with armies of soldiers, bombs and a fearsome military force. The other was fought alongside it with cameras, satellites, armies of journalists and propaganda techniques. One war was rationalized as an effort to find and disarm WMDs - Weapons of Mass Destruction; the other was carried out by even more powerful WMDs, Weapons of Mass Deception. The TV networks in America considered their non-stop coverage their finest hour, pointing to the use of embedded journalists and new technologies that permitted viewers to see a war up close for the first time. But different countries saw different wars. Why? For those of us watching the coverage, war was more of a spectacle, an around the clock global media marathon, pitting media outlets against each other in ways that distorted truth and raised as many questions about the methods of TV news, as it did the armed intervention it was covering-and it some cases-promoting." Danny Schecter
Former Emmy award winning network journalist turned "media dissector" Danny Schecter explored this story through "self-embedding" himself in his living room to monitor media coverage, fastidiously tracking the TV coverage on a daily basis. He wrote thousands of words daily about the coverage for Mediachannel.org, the world's largest online media issues network, and then collected his columns, blogs and articles in a recently published book, EMBEDDED: Weapons of Mass Deception (Prometheus Books). With WMD, Schecter continues to ask the questions that his media colleagues refused to confront before, during and after the war. Featuring footage from inside Iraq, and inside the media, WMD tracks the media war through February 2004. WMD indicts the packaged television programming that programmed us.