Why don't we burn and distribute our own news DVDs? [View All]

[StefanX]

If the media won't cover Cindy Sheehan and other news enough, why don't we just cover it ourselves and burn a few DVDs? Hand 'em out at work, on the subway, on the street corner - or maybe even sell them for a buck or two and create some jobs in this stagnant economy!

WillPitt is interviewing Cindy Sheehan - but don't hold your breath for CNN to run that interview. And people are wild about this Flash animation from Ben Cohen at http://www.truemajority.org/fun .

I just got a 50-pack of DVD-Rs at Staples for about 20 bucks. What's that - 40 cents a DVD? Lots of people have DVD burners nowadays - and even more people have DVD players. (We could also do audio CDs - even more people have those, including Walkmans and car stereos.)

If we had a website where we could upload and vote on "Today's Top Videos" (like the way we recommend DU threads for the "Greatest" page) then we'd have some high-quality stuff that people would love to watch. I bet DemocraticMediaUnderground would become a hot item and give cable a run for the money! Station programmers and news editors get paid big bucks to do what sites like DU and Kos already do - track down stories and figure out which ones are "hot". (And frankly, the "netroots" is starting to do a better job at it than all those high-paid media execs are.)

Lots of people are too busy or whatever to be reading and typing all day, and that's ok. For most people, audio and video are always going to be more interesting than text. There's nothing wrong with that, and we should accept it and leverage it.

Rather than donating millions of dollars so that we can just hand it over to buy ads in the media (who really aren't our "friends"), why don't we just use that money to BE the media?

Remember during the Soviet days - they had "samizdat" where people painstakingly typed out carbon copies and distributed them underground. (Xerox machines were prohibited!) And here we are today with all these CD burners and DVD burners, complaining that the media won't cover the real issues - while we're all sitting on the most massive pile of media equipment the world has ever known.