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Media and Society

ACORN AND THE FIRESTORM

Director: Reuben Atlas, Sam Pollard

If you were impoverished and politically voiceless, ACORN hoped to change your mind. For 40 years, the community-organizing group sought to empower marginalized communities. Its critics, though, believed ACORN exemplified everything wrong with liberal ideals.

Fueled by a YouTube video made by two young conservatives who posed as pimp and prostitute in a sting, ACORN's very existence would be challenged. ACORN and the Firestorm goes beyond the 24-hour news cycle and cuts to the heart of the great political divide.

DVD / 2017 / 84 minutes

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CELLING YOUR SOUL

Directed by Joni Siani

An examination of our love/hate relationships with our digital devices from the first digitally socialized generation, and what we can do about it.

In one short decade, we have totally changed the way we interact with one another. The millennial generation, the first to be socialized in a digital world, is now feeling the unintended consequences.

CELLING YOUR SOUL is a powerful and informative examination of how our young people actually feel about connecting in the digital world and their love/hate relationship with technology. It provides empowering strategies for more fulfilling, balanced, and authentic human interaction within the digital landscape.

The film reveals the effects of "digital socialization" by taking viewers on a personal journey with a group of high school and college students who through a digital cleanse discover the power of authentic human connectivity, and that there is "No App" or piece of technology that can ever replace the benefits of human connection.

DVD / 2017 / (Grades 6-12, College, Adult) / 48 minutes

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PULITZER AT 100, THE

Director: Kirk Simon

Directed by Academy Award Winner Kirk Simon, The Pulitzer at 100 celebrates the centenary of this revered and seminal national award for literary excellence in journalism and the arts. The riveting tales of the winning artists give an insider's view of how these pinnacles of achievement are selected and how the award has the power to change lives and communities. The diverse stories explored in the film relate to immigration, race, gender, and above all freedom of speech - all issues that are ever more relevant in America today.

Featuring interviews with several notable prize recipients, including authors, journalists, playwrights and musicians such as Toni Morrison, Michael Chabon, Junot Diaz, Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, Ayad Akhtar, Carl Bernstein, Robert Caro, Martin Baron, Nicholas Kristof, Thomas Friedman, David Remnick, Wynton Marsalis and John Adams, the film also brings Pulitzer-winning works to life through readings by Martin Scorsese, Helen Mirren, Natalie Portman, Live Schreiber, John Lithgow and Yara Shahidi, all of whom bring their own talents to bear on the words of their favorite writers.

Interwoven with the stories of the journalists and artists and readings is the history of the man who created it. Joseph Pulitzer, who came to America to fight as a mercenary in the Civil War, left money to Columbia University upon his death in 1911. A portion of his bequest was used to found the School of Journalism in 1912, not only to elevate the professionalism and to improve the craft but also to establish the Pulitzer Prizes which were first awarded in 1917. A thoughtful and colorful tapestry of the last 100 years of journalistic and artistic life in America, The Pulitzer at 100 is an illuminating and thought-provoking work that will spark the imagination of viewers, marking the beginning of a re-exploration and revisiting of the astonishing power of literature, in all forms, that have enriched our lives.

DVD / 2017 / 91 minutes

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ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE: TRUTH, DECEPTION, AND THE SPIRIT OF I.F. STONE

Director: Fred Peabody

Independent journalists like Amy Goodman, Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Matt Taibbi are changing the face of journalism, providing investigative, adversarial alternatives to mainstream, corporate news outlets. Our cameras follow as they expose government and corporate deception - just as the ground-breaking independent journalist I.F. Stone did decades ago.

DVD / 2016 / 91 minutes

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BAPTISM OF FIRE, A

By Jerome Clement-Wilz

"As it gets harder to sell pictures, we take greater and greater risks," explains Corentin Fohlen. A war correspondent still in his twenties, Fohlen is part of a new generation of freelance journalists who fly to war zones from Libya to Afghanistan on their own dime in the hope of selling images to news media outlets.

But the carefree attitude of youth can change when confronted with the harsh reality of life in wartime. When a colleague is killed in Syria, Fohlen's thirst for adventure turns into a deeper reflection on the meaning of work and life. Director Clement-Wilz followed Fohlen through shells and bullets for four years in order to create this riveting portrait of the life of a contemporary war correspondent.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2015 / 52 minutes

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HOT TYPE: 150 YEARS OF THE NATION

Director: Barbara Kopple

Hot Type: 150 Years of The Nation is a vivid, inside look at America's oldest continuously published weekly magazine. Shot over three years in intimate, cinema verite style, the film captures the day-to-day pressures and challenges of publishing the progressive magazine as it follows reporters out into the field, the editors who shape their work, and the editor-in chief who tries to keep all of the plates spinning.

Writers are the heart and soul of the magazine, and the film follows them extensively. Sasha Abramsky travels to West Texas to report on the years-long drought that has gripped the region and the devastating economic impact on farmers and residents. John Nichols unpacks what's going on behind the effort to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Amy Wilentz visits the "temporary" tent camps of Haiti, three years after the earthquake, to shed light on the dire conditions and lackluster international response. And Dani McClain reports on the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina, and its dynamic leader Rev. William Barber, as they push back against an extreme right-wing takeover of the state legislature.

In all of the current-day reported stories, The Nation's incredible trove of archival articles - and roster of writers - acts as an historical touchstone and illuminates how the past continuously ripples through and shapes current events.

At a fascinating moment in American history - politically, socially and culturally - the media landscape is changing at breathtaking speed. The film charts the journey of The Nation - and the nation - evolving into the future, as it is guided by its remarkable past.

DVD / 2015 / 92 minutes

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PROJECT Z

Directed by Phillip Gara

An investigation into how war games, worst-case scenarios, complex systems, and networked media produce the very crises they seek to model, predict and report.

As the Cold War ends, a professor goes in search of an America without an enemy. Armed with a Hi8 video camera and inspired by the detective work of Walter Benjamin, he heads deep into the inner circles of the defense, entertainment and media industries, where he discovers a worst-case future being built from war games, video games, and language games.

Some thirty years later, a group of student filmmakers find the videotapes in a filing cabinet, along with a stack of old newspaper clippings, audio interviews and photographs. With the help of friends from the Global Media Project, the filmmaker produces an experimental documentary that goes back to the future, where they find the original maps for a new world order. An unexpected warning is found on the outermost edges of the maps: "Beware of Zombies!"

The result is PROJECT Z, a film that updates another warning, issued by President Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address, about the emergence of a "military-industrial complex" and the consequences should "public policy be captured by a scientific and technological elite".

Combining rare footage from inside the war machine with corrosive commentary by leading critics of global violence, injustice, and inequality, the film challenges the living to write their own future before the walking dead conjure the final global event.

DVD / 2015 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 74 minutes

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WORLD ACCORDING TO RUSSIA TODAY, THE

By Misja Pekel

In 2014, Malaysian Airlines passenger flight 17 was shot down with a rocket intended for the private plane of Russian president Vladimir Putin... If, that is, a viewer is relying on the satellite TV network Russia Today as their source for news.

These claims were not the first time Russia Today drew attention for counter-factual reporting: during the 2008 war in Georgia, the network reported that South Ossetians were the victims of genocide at the hands of Georgians. In 2014, the channel was warned by the British TV agency for its biased and inaccurate reporting on the uprising on Maidan Square in Kiev. The list goes on and on.

Russia Today (now renamed just RT) was launched in 2005 to bring a Russian-centric perspective on current political events to a global audience. After a decade of generous Kremlin funding, 2015 found the 24-hour news channel the biggest media organization on YouTube with 2 billion viewers: more than CNN and the BBC combined.

The network claims only to offer an alternative perspective to the monolithic view presented by mainstream Western media. But what kind of "reporting" is Russia Today actually doing? What is it like to work for the channel? How much influence does the Kremlin really have there? Is it possible to differentiate between fact and opinion on a Russian channel when the Russian interests are at stake?

In Misja Pekel's disturbing documentary THE WORLD ACCORDING TO RUSSIA TODAY, former and current news anchors, editors and correspondents for the network-including William Dunbar, Sara Firth, Marc de Jersey, Afshin Rattansi and Liz Wahl-join journalists and media professionals Alexander Nekrassov, Peter Pomerantsev, Richard Sambrook, Daniel Sandford, Derk Sauer and more in a detailed dissection of the channel's modus operandi and the challenges and dangers of reporting and consuming news in a globalized world.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2015 / 40 minutes

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JOURNALISM SECRETS TO SOCIAL MEDIA STORYTELLING & NEWS REPORTING

Social media tools are being used across all media sources including traditional news outlets and online-based resources. This program focuses on the variety of ways social media is essential to storytelling and news distribution. Each chapter highlights an element of social media used by top journalists who rely on these communication channels to both research stories and broaden their audience. Its designed to help students and educators understand the growing role of social media in the gathering and dissemination of news and the many ways to make the most of this technology.

Social media has changed how we gather and report news in general. Its a crucial tool in reporting today since we receive many tips and reach many sources to confirm information even before the story ever makes mainstream media. This is more often the case especially when breaking news happens. Its important for students to use social media to gain and disseminate information and to research each topic thoroughly, read as much as they can and be familiar with every side of the issue.

We will teach students how to humanize the issues so they are not just talking about statistics or numbers. How to use Storify, Tumblr, Buzzfeed, Opensecrets.org and different websites like Mashables - that have interesting information and ways for students to get out and tell stories using audio, video and pictures. How to ensure the information they obtain is vetted and accurate and ensure the story is valuable or newsworthy. How to get as many aspects of a story as they can and how to make it different from similar stories out there to help inform their audience.

We will show students how to use their journalism skills and apply them to this new medium and above and beyond, how to capture the absolute essence in a paragraph - confirm it, attribute it and source it.

Subjects covered include: Using Social Media in Politics, Putting the Public back in Public Affairs, Social Media as a Database, The Day in the Life of an Online Reporter and Behind the Scenes of Storify. Includes a list of links and websites to help students investigate stories and find out more about newsgathering and dissemination practices.

DVD / 2014 / (Grades 9-Adult) / 31 minutes

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THREAD, THE

Directed by Greg Baker

The Thread is a documentary that exposes how the internet manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers changed the face of journalism forever, and discusses the undeniable impact amateur internet writers are having on journalism today. Following the deadly attacks at the 2013 Boston Marathon, amateur internet sleuths took to Twitter and Reddit, intent on identifying the individuals responsible for the biggest terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. More than 3 million people followed the manhunt on Reddit, many of whom were convinced they were qualified to identify clues or suspects, based upon their internet investigations.

Set against a backdrop of the official, week-long hunt for the terrorists on the streets of Boston, this documentary reveals the parallel, unofficial, online investigation that captured the world's imagination, but led to innocent people being accused of the crime. This thought-provoking documentary explores how the media landscape has been transformed by widespread use of social media, and questions the future of traditional journalism. The documentary features interviews with journalists and executives of global media giants, as well as social media users, to ask important questions about the media and society.

DVD / 2014 / 62 minutes

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FRAGILE TRUST, A - PLAGIARISM, POWER, AND JAYSON BLAIR AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

Directed by Samantha Grant

Tells the shocking story of New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, the most infamous plagiarist of our time.

A FRAGILE TRUST tells the shocking story of Jayson Blair, the most infamous serial plagiarist of our time, and how he unleashed the massive scandal that rocked the New York Times and the entire world of journalism. In 2003 Blair was caught plagiarizing and supplementing his own reporting with fabricated details in dozens of stories published in the Times. The daily operations of the Times newsroom became a public spectacle as every major news outlet picked up the story and ran with it. The fact that Blair is African-American was emphasized again and again as accounts of the 'Blair Affair' served up sordid details in a soap-opera style tale of deception, drug abuse, racism, mental illness, hierarchy, white guilt, and power struggles inside the hallowed halls of the New York Times.

Through the course of the film, we follow Blair as he slowly unravels in the face of mounting pressures and distractions. Starting with his 'reporting' of the plagiarized article that ultimately lead to his undoing, we trace the rise and fall of this fascinating young reporter as he clings to his career at the Times even as he is losing his mind.

Featuring exclusive interviews with everyone involved, including former Executive Editor Howell Raines and Blair himself, A FRAGILE TRUST is the first film to tell the whole sordid story of the scandal while exploring deeper themes of power, ethics, and responsibility in the mainstream media.

DVD / 2013 / (Grades 9-12, College, Adult) / 75 minutes

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INREALLIFE

Director: Beeban Kidron

InRealLife asks what exactly is the internet and what is it doing to our children? Taking us on a journey from the bedrooms of teenagers to Silicon Valley, filmmaker Beeban Kidron suggests that rather than the promise of free and open connectivity, young people are increasingly ensnared in a commercial world. Beguiling and glittering on the outside, it can be alienating and addictive. Quietly building its case, Kidron's film asks if we can afford to stand by while our children, trapped in their 24/7 connectivity, are being outsourced to the net?

While newspapers alternately praise and panic about the glittering world of the Internet, there is a generation of children who have grown up with a smart phone in their hand, connected to the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Public discourse seems to revolve around privacy, an issue that embodies the fears and concerns of adults. What is less discussed is what it really means to always be online, never alone and increasingly bombarded by a world that has something to sell you and appears to know you better than yourself. A world that is so ubiquitous that it is the first thing you see as you wake up in the morning and the last thing you see before you go to sleep at night.

For adults there was a 'before' the net. But for the current generation, at the time of their most rapid development they have no other experience and few tools with which to negotiate the overwhelming parade of opportunity and cost that the internet delivers directly into their hands.

From the bedrooms of five disparate teenagers and then into the companies that profit from the internet, InRealLifetakes a closer look at some of the behavioral outcomes that come from living in a commercially driven, 'interruption' culture.

Following the physical journey of the internet, from fiber optic cables through sewers and under oceans, from London to NYC and finally to Silicon Valley, the film reveals that what is often thought of as an 'open, democratic and free' world is in fact dominated by a small group of powerful players. Meanwhile our kids - merely pawns in the game - are adapting to this new world - along with their expectation of friendship, their cognition and their sexuality.

DVD / 2013 / 90 minutes

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KILLING THE MESSENGER: THE DEADLY COST OF NEWS

By Eric Matthies and Tricia Todd

In December 2006, the UN Security Council unanimously passed landmark Resolution 1738 which demanded greater safety for journalists in conflict areas and called for an end to impunity for their killers. Yet, since then, over 600 news media workers have been killed, making murder the leading cause of work-related death for journalists worldwide. Even more have been imprisoned or have simply disappeared while on the job, and countless others have been intimidated into self-censorship or have gone into exile.

In this intense documentary, journalists reporting from Mexico, Russia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria tell their riveting personal stories of working in some of the world's most dangerous places, in what is becoming one of the most dangerous professions.

As censorship grows around the globe, it's more important than ever that journalists have the freedom to report honestly and accurately on world events. Killing the Messenger: the Deadly Cost of News is a first-hand account of these fearless journalists and their refusal to be deterred from their dedicated mission.

DVD / 2013 / 57 minutes

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REPORTING ON THE TIMES: THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE HOLOCAUST

Directed by Emily Harrold

Reporting on the Times is a short documentary film inspired ?by Laurel Leff's award-winning book Buried by the Times. The film explores how The New York Times handled reports of the Holocaust during World War II. It also investigates why The Times, a Jewish owned newspaper, buried more than one thousand articles in its back pages. Was it simply an oversight? Or did the publishers and editors fear an American anti-Semitic backlash?

Through interviews and testimony of a Holocaust survivor, historians, and New York Times journalists, Reporting on the Times encourages audiences to reevaluate America's reputation as "The Great Liberator." The film also asks viewers to consider the power of the press in creating change.

DVD / 2013 / 18 minutes

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SMILING THROUGH THE APOCALYPSE

Director: Tom Hayes

Esquire magazine was a galvanizing force in American culture from the early 1960s through the early '70s. Forging its pop-cultural capital on the basis of provocative cover art, intellectual audacity and riveting articles by the preeminent and cutting edge writers of the time, the magazine captured the zeitgeist of America in the crucible of the '60s.

The chief architect of this print revolution was Harold Hayes, a brilliant and tenacious editor who granted Esquire's contributors unprecedented journalistic freedom. Hayes' fearless instincts provided a haven for writers like Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Nora Ephron, William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer, and nurtured the iconoclastic talents of art director George Lois. By making it possible for writers and artists to bring novelistic techniques into reportage Hayes fostered what became known as "New Journalism".

The indelible cultural contributions captured in this enthralling documentary by his son, Tom Hayes, provide a vivid context for nothing less than the rebirth of American aesthetics. Featuring interviews with Robert Benton, Candice Bergen, Peter Bogdanovich, Brock Brower, Graydon Carter, Lee Eisenberg, Harlan Ellison, Nora Ephron, Robert Frank, Hugh Hefner, Tom Meehan, Frank Rich, Bob Rifkind, Gay Talese, Gore Vidal, Ed Wilson, Tom Wolfe and many others.

DVD / 2013 / 99 minutes

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ELECTRIC SIGNS

By Alice Arnold

New screen-based sign systems are putting TV-style advertising into the public domain in cities around the globe. These electronic signs are re-shaping urban environments and re-defining areas of public space by intensifying the commercialization of the public sphere.

In addition to the explosion of screens in public spaces, screens are ubiquitous in work spaces and in people's daily life activities. These seamless, illuminated electronic surfaces are becoming the devices through which we frame our experiences. ELECTRIC SIGNS explores this new screen culture as it unfolds in the global city.

The film's narrator, a city observer modeled on the critic Walter Benjamin, takes us on a journey through a variety of urban landscapes, examining public spaces and making connections between light, perception and the culture of attractions in today's consumer society.

The film is structured as a documentary essay in the spirit of city symphony films, and features footage in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, New York, and other cities around the world. Also featured are interviews with prominent lighting designers; advertising and marketing professionals; urban sociologists and visual culture experts; and community activists.

The filmmakers traveled around the world to collect footage of electronic signs and media facades from cities on four continents. The film captures the beauty and excitement of these illuminated signs while examining their messages, and looks at city life from many perspectives, so as to capture the intensification of urban life amidst the vast spaces beneath the skyscrapers.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2012 / 58 minutes

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LOGIN 2 LIFE

By Daniel Moshel

Centered around two people homebound by their disabilities who have found community online, LOGIN 2 LIFE explores the growing number of people who spend much of their lives in online virtual worlds.

Elaborate digital platforms like Second Life and World of Warcraft offer novel opportunities for friendship, sex, employment, and aesthetic experience in virtual communities populated by cartoon-like avatars. While these simulated worlds are often treated with contempt by the general media, LOGIN 2 LIFE takes a more sympathetic approach, profiling seven people deeply immersed in these worlds, and attempting to understand what each gets from their virtual life.

Paralyzed from the neck down in a car accident, 27 year-old Corey spends most of his days playing World of Warcraft, exploring a virtual landscape with far greater ease than he can move through his physical one. Alice, 60, has limited mobility due to multiple sclerosis. In Second Life, she is able to draw on her skills as an educator and volunteer to run an in-game business that provides resources to other disabled people.

We also meet a diverse cast of characters from around the world, whose different online engagements illustrate the range of motivations for choosing a largely virtual existence. Kevin, a middle-aged family man in Florida, makes his living selling virtual sex devices within the Second Life universe. Philippe, in France, is an award-winning director of World of Warcraft machinima who has turned is hobby into a career. In China, a family of World of Warcraft "gold farmers" toil endlessly online, earning in-game currency that can be sold for real money.

LOGIN 2 LIFE reconsiders the demarcation usually drawn between physical and online worlds. The film asks us to consider whether the people we have met are exceptions, driven to digital immersion by particular needs, or if they are pioneers of a lifestyle that will soon become commonplace.

DVD (Color) / 2012 / 86 minutes

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SHADOWS OF LIBERTY

Directed by Jean-Philippe Tremblay

Uses shocking examples of cover-ups and censorship by the US media to show how a few mega corporations exercise control over the content of our news.

SHADOWS OF LIBERTY examines how the US media are controlled by a handful of corporations exercising extraordinary political, social, and economic power. Having always allowed broadcasting to be controlled by commercial interests, the loosening of media ownership regulations, that began under Reagan and continued under Clinton, has led to the current situation where five mega corporations control the vast majority of the media in the United States. These companies not only don't prioritize investigative journalism, but can and do clamp down on it when their interests are threatened.

The film begins with three journalists whose careers were destroyed because of the stories they broke: Roberta Baskin, whose scoop about Nike sweatshops didn't sit well with CBS when Nike became a co-sponsor of the Olympics; Kristina Borjesson, another CBS reporter, whose job lasted precisely one week after the network spiked her investigation into the TWA Flight 800 disaster in 1996; and Gary Webb, whose story linking US support for Nicaraguan Contras and the epidemic in crack cocaine was trashed by The New York Times and the Washington Post. (His story was true, but Webb lost his job and eventually killed himself.)

With the help of interviewees including Daniel Ellsburg, Dan Rather, Julian Assange, Chris Hedges, Dick Gregory, Robert McChesney, John Nichols and Amy Goodman, the film explores in depth the monopolies and vested interests that filter the dissemination of information thus damaging the democratic process. One notorious example, featured in the film, of the anti-democratic nexus between the military-industrial complex and the news media was the latter's unquestioning acceptance of the former's trumped up justification for the Iraq War.

With profits taking priority over the truth and the powerful being taken at their word rather than taken to task, the film asks whether the Internet can withstand corporate pressure and remain free, or will it too fall into the hands of monopolistic corporations.

Ultimately has our commercial world caused us to lose one of the most precious commodities of all--unbiased information?

DVD / 2012 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 93 minutes

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BATTLE FOR THE ARAB VIEWER, THE

By Nordin Lasfar

In early 2011, people around the world tuned into Al Jazeera to watch the Egyptian revolution in real time. Meanwhile, rival broadcaster Al Arabiya was also offering near continuous coverage, with cameras on a balcony overlooking the 6th October Bridge, where protesters and police clashed.

How was the content of those broadcasts - and the networks' subsequent coverage - influenced by their political allegiances?

Featuring interviews with current and former journalists from both networks, and analysis from independent pundits, The Battle for the Arab Viewer highlights the philosophical differences between the two pan-Arab networks.

Al Jazeera was created by the Emir of Qatar after he deposed his father in a coup. The station typically champions the poor and social movements - such as the Muslim Brotherhood - that are hostile to the Saudi regime. The station has grown highly influential. In the film, a passerby stops Al Jazeera's chief Cairo correspondent on the street to thank him and the government of Qatar for supporting the anti-Mubarak forces, saying the network is "90%" responsible for the revolution.

With Al Jazeera supporting elements hostile to Saudi Arabia, the Saudis set up their own network as a counterpoint: the more conservative Al Arabiya, owned by a close friend of the royal family.

While The Battle for the Arab Viewer offers insight and analysis, it also shows how the battle between the two networks plays out on the ground in Cairo. We go behind the scenes with Al Arabiya journalist Randa Abul Azm and Al Jazeera's Abdelfattah Fayed as they follow stories, break news, and cover events such as Hosni Mubarak's trial. (Azm is allowed into the courtroom, but Fayed is not.)

Azm and Fayed each mirror their networks' respective demographics. Al Arabiya appeals to well-off, middle-class viewers who value security and stability. Enter Amz, who lives in a building built by her engineer father, on a street named for her grandfather. Fayed, representing the network that purports to stand for the downtrodden, shows us a photo of his father, who worked in agriculture.

Both deny that their work is influenced by the political agendas of their networks' owners. But former employees of both networks tell a different story. Particularly striking is the case of Hafez al Mirazi, who was taken off Al Arabiya's airwaves after promising to put Saudi Arabia under the microscope on his show.

Media bias is nothing new - as Mirazi says, viewers of Fox News and MSNBC each know what they are going to get. What is different in the Arab world is that the networks are directly owned by states. He says, "They keep shifting according to the countries they are sponsored by, and that affects the stories their citizens get on a daily basis."

Ultimately, the problem may resolve itself. As democracy spreads through the region, will truly independent media follow?

DVD (Color) / 2011 / 48 minutes

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OUR NEWSPAPER

Directed by Eline Flipse

After journalist Andrey Schkolni leaves his job at The Leninist, the state-supported - and state-censored - regional paper in Uljanovsk, Russia, he and his wife, Marina, decide to start their own newspaper. The couple takes on local apathy, isolationism, criticism, and ridicule; they are determined to serve the local population, located over 550 miles from Moscow in a largely rural, often snowbound area. Week after week, everything from writing and researching the articles to designing the layout takes place in their small home. They even work to distribute the paper - which they name Our Newspaper - with their tiny family car.

Slowly Andrey's doggedly reported local news and Marina's horoscopes and home remedies begin to catch on. When Our Newspaper's circulation and size climbs to 7,000 weekly readers and eight pages, it begins to pose real competition to the four-page Leninist. Finally, the isolated population can read their own news: instead of "articles" about far-off cities, golden harvests, and unrealizable state projects, Our Newspaper reports on an impoverished village without running water for three months and profiles a courageous local doctor who makes house calls her bicycle despite freezing temperatures.

Andrey and Marina's light-hearted local news gathering quickly gathers gravity, however - until it eventually puts its creators in danger. The issues facing the once prosperous but now economically depressed region are very serious. Despite his best efforts to protect himself and his wife, Andrey's reporting begins to implicate corrupt local corporations and political officials and raise thorny questions of journalistic and business ethics.

Juxtaposing small, personal stories against the background of contemporary Russian history, OUR NEWSPAPER creates a portrait of personal integrity and bravery under increasingly desperate circumstances. The award-winning Dutch director Eline Flipse (Broken Silence, Albanian Stories) paints subtle portraits of her film's powerful personalities with warmth, humor and complexity that will stay with you long after the film ends; it is an unforgettable illustration of modern Russia and the vital role of journalism in an emerging democracy.

DVD (Color) / 2011 / 58 minutes

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BARBERSHOP PUNK: NET NEUTRALITY, MEDIA CONSOLIDATION AND YOU

Directed by Georgia Sugimura Archer

A David & Goliath tale of one man's fight against restrictions by Internet service providers and governments on consumers' access to the internet.

Robb Topolski is an unlikely crusader for free speech -- on the surface; he seems to be a mild-mannered geek with a fondness for a capella music. However, when Topolski tried to upload some rare recordings of barbershop quartets to a peer-to-peer file sharing website in 2007, he found that his broadband Internet connection slowed down to a tiny fraction of its usual speed.

Topolski, who worked as a computer network engineer, ran some tests to find out what was happening and made a surprising discovery -- his internet service provider was monitoring the web use of its customers and using software to slow connections for certain activities and certain websites. Topolski took his ISP to court and has become a passionate spokesman for net neutrality, believing that ISP's have no right to interfere with what their customers are doing and should not be watching their activities on line.

This case is one of the key inspirations behind the documentary BARBERSHOP PUNK, which explores how a small number of powerful corporations have the power to control the World Wide Web, and what ordinary people can do to promote the free exchange of information in cyberspace.

Featuring interviews with Ian MacKaye, Janeane Garofalo, Damian Kulash of OK Go, Henry Rollins, Mike McCurry, John Perry Barlow, Jonathan Adelstein and many more.

DVD / 2010 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 77 minutes

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FACEBOOK'S ADORNO CHANGED MY LIFE

By Georg Boch

Theodor Adorno was an influential member of the Frankfurt School of social theory - a German-born intellectual who fled Nazi Germany for America, and whose work anticipates and informs much post-modern theory. In this revolutionary "participatory documentary," digital filmmaker Georg Boch, one of more than 200 people that belong to a Facebook group called "Adorno Changed My Life," sets out to learn how Adorno's work has touched the group's lives.

For the film, Boch solicits videos and Skype conversations. Unlike the traditional documentary, this approach allows each of the participants to frame how they want to be perceived and to direct their own conversations.

For art historian Travis English, who shamelessly multitasks on camera, reading Adorno for the first time was like "swallowing a stick of dynamite." Australian intellectual Ivan Krisjansen (who uses a portrait of Adorno as his Facebook profile photo) compares it to "climbing Mount Everest, standing on the peak and being able to see forever."

Digital culture critic Dennis Redmond - who at times speaks in front of a shelf full of teddy bears - sees parallels between Adorno's work and the digital commons. Redmond encourages viewers to read random pages from Adorno to see how they seamlessly fit into a whole in the same way that fragments of digital culture mesh.

It's also a metaphor for the film itself: far-flung, isolated members of an online group whose individual contributions are transformed into a cultural product. The film also makes no attempt to hide its digital roots. Rather than cleaning up time lags or sharpening focus, it celebrates the imperfections of digital communication.

FACEBOOK'S "ADORNO CHANGED MY LIFE" resists the temptation to offer a potted guide to the philosopher's thought. Instead, it allows its participants to set the terms of the conversation, and to reveal their relationships to Adorno's work. Even if they feel, as does Moldavian emigrant Vitalie Bezdiga, that "Theodore Adorno is of no great help when it comes to jobs or employment."

DVD (Color) / 2010 / 28 minutes

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WAR YOU DON'T SEE, THE

Directed by John Pilger

John Pilger's powerful and timely investigation into the media's role in war.

John Pilger's new film is a powerful and timely investigation into the media's role in war. The War You Don't See traces the history of `embedded' and independent reporting from the carnage of World War I to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan. As weapons and propaganda are ever more sophisticated, the very nature of war has developed into an `electronic battlefield'. But who is the real enemy today?

DVD / 2010 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 96 minutes

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MEDIA RESEARCHERS: VIOLENCE & TELEVISION

By Cindy Lont and Susan Kehoe
With George Gerbner

George Gerbner, communication scholar, theorist, teacher, poet, and the founder of cultivation theory, discusses his work which influenced four decades of research on violence and television.

DVD / 2008 / (Grades 9-Adult) / 25 minutes

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MADE OVER IN AMERICA

By Bernadette Wegenstein & Geoffrey Alan Rhodes

In the age of surgically enhanced beauty and reality television, how do we perceive body image? MADE OVER IN AMERICA combines the style of reality television with experimental film to weave together the voices of producers and consumers, surgeons and their patients, clinical psychologists, media theorists, and youth who are coming of age in a culture where bodies seem to be customizable. Together they form a picture of how the desire for a better self operates within consumer culture and how this desire is fed by media, the makeover industry and culture at large.

Among those in the film are Cindy, a San Diego housewife who felt ugly all her life until she was made over in the first season of FOX's show The Swan, a plastic surgery makeover show; The Swan producer Nely Galan, who says she invented the show to empower women; Cathy, a 21-year-old college student who dreams of carving her own belly into a six pack and her roommate's nose and bottom down to average size; Beverly Hills celebrity cosmetic surgeon and artist Dr. Randal Hayworth, who uses the metaphor of Michelangelo carving beauty from marble to describe his instinctual approach to surgery; and maxillo-facial surgeon and beauty expert Dr. Stephen Marquardt, who has become famous for analyzing beauty according to a mathematically proportionate grid to which all beautiful faces conform.

MADE OVER IN AMERICA includes archival material on child development, actual plastic surgery procedures, art video and collage montages showing popular imagery, combined with powerful stories of how far Americans will go to fit in, showing the power of media in shaping ideas of beauty.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2007 / 65 minutes

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DEMOCRACY ON DEADLINE

By Calvin Skaggs

If, as the saying goes, information is power, then journalists can be seen as watchdogs of our government leaders and custodians of the public good, providing truthful information to help citizens build or preserve democratic societies. DEMOCRACY ON DEADLINE is a comprehensive look at journalists worldwide, working in different media and various languages, as they attempt to speak truth to power.

Filmed in the United States and countries throughout Africa, Asia, Central America, Europe and the Middle East, DEMOCRACY ON DEADLINE profiles international journalists as they cover local and international events, and in the process enables them to discuss their sense of vocation, the need to defend journalistic principles against commercial pressures, how they deal with censorship or government constraints, as well as dangerous and even life-threatening conditions.

Among the many journalists featured are those at Radio SKY in Sierra Leone as they cover an election in a country where more people listen to radio than read newspapers; Moscow journalists (including Anna Politkovskaya, assassinated in October 2006) who discuss government control of the media and covering the Chechen War; the publisher, editors and journalists at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz who explain why they feel it is important, especially for a readership too often concerned only with its own agony, to document the violence directed against Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank; and several U.S. journalists who discuss how the press failed in its reporting of the Bush Administration's misuse of intelligence on the lead-up to the Iraq War.

In an era when mainstream journalism, especially in the U.S., is being steadily eroded by political manipulation, commercial constraints, and circulation and ratings pressures, DEMOCRACY ON DEADLINE is an important reminder of the crucial political value of an independent news media in any democratic society.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2006 / 114 minutes

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INDEPENDENT INTERVENTION: BREAKING SILENCE

Focuses on the human cost of the Iraq War to contrast corporate-controlled media coverage with independent media.

Independent Intervention is an award-winning documentary about United States media coverage of the conflict in Iraq. Focusing on the human costs of war, it contrasts corporate-controlled media coverage of the invasion of Iraq with independent media reports of the brutal realities on the ground.

Through discussions with media experts including Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Dahr Jamail, Danny Schechter, David Barsamian, Kalle Lasn, Norman Solomon, and James Zogby, the film investigates important issues and systems that govern today's information flow, and shows how these systems of control reveal themselves during times of political turmoil and war.

Independent Intervention also includes commentary by Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, Bill Moyers, Michael Moore, and Jeremy Scahill.

DVD (Color) / 2006 / (Grades 9-12, College, Adult) / 75 minutes

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TRIBE OF HIS OWN, A: THE JOURNALISM OF P. SAINATH

Indian journalist reminds us of the meaning of responsible journalism.

At a time when government propaganda and corporate spin are increasingly presented as fact, and a handful of corporations control the news, A TRIBE OF HIS OWN: THE JOURNALISM OF P. SAINATH reminds us what news media can be.

In India, nearly 400 million people live in poverty. Believing that responsible journalism can help to change things for the better, Palagummi Sainath wrote a series of 70 newspaper articles for The Times of India chronicling the living conditions in the ten poorest districts of the country. For two years Sainath lived in the communities he wrote about; he traveled across India, often on foot, in hill areas, drought-prone areas, and tribal areas to put the issue of poverty back on the national agenda.

After nearly a decade of work and dozens of awards, Sainath remains as passionately committed as ever. According to Sainath the shift from hard-hitting, truth-seeking journalism to innocuous, promotional stenography goes hand in hand with the increase of globalization. This, he believes, has also contributed to the 1990s becoming "the time of the most gross social inequality since the Second World War."

A TRIBE OF HIS OWN follows Sainath to the Indian villages he writes about and explores his contention that "journalism is for people, not shareholders."

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2001 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 50 minutes

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COMMUNICATION IS POWER: MASS MEDIA & MASS PERSUASION

Examines advertising as a prelude to understanding the forms of mass persuasion. Investigates violence in the media and studies the history of persuasion in newspapers and magazines. Also examines the growing influence of electronic media in politics and dramatizes the controversial issues of political advertising and news management.

DVD / 60 minutes

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