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Freedom To Disagree: “The Revolution Is Being Televised”

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by FreedomHouse, Flickr

In this remarkable video by Adam Pletts for Al Jazeera, [7:59] a former real-estate construction manager turned media activist states, “It was impossible before the revolution to make a media centre or publish any photo or video against the regime.” Sitting on the floor, snacking and smoking cigarettes in a village guarded by the Free Syrian Army, a team of media activists points to coverage by Reuters on the T.V. and have differing opinions about editing the team’s video content for distribution. One main debate surrounds how much “flesh and blood” is too much to show before it’s too shocking for people to even watch. The former construction manager, who now serves as media coordinator, states, “This discussion is normal and necessary. For 50 years the regime took only one side and never listened to the others sides. So if I behave the same way now, I will be behaving like the regime.” But later [16:05] he seems to contradict himself: “I am an activist, only an activist. I am with the revolution, so I will only tell this side.”

2013 Year of the Pigeon

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The Magician transcends duality. He has learned the fundamental elements of the universe, represented by emblems of the four suits of the tarot already broken apart and lying on the table before him. Similarly, in the Book of Thoth deck, he is crowned by snakes, another symbol of both infinity and dualism, as snakes have learned from Gilgamesh how to shed their skins and be reborn, thus achieving a type of immortality; the blind prophet Tiresias split apart coupling snakes and as a result became a woman, transcending the dualism of gender. source: Wikipedia

For us at Public Herald, 2012 was the ‘Year of the Snake.’ We’ve been intimately connected to water while shooting and editing our first documentary film Triple Divide, that began as a small project in 2011 but blossomed into a 95-minute Public Herald Studios production about fracking in the Marcellus Shale region. Like the water snake, we’ve been holed up in our Pennsylvania editing “den” for much of the year, only venturing out to devour necessary sustenance — truth and creativity — as the drama of deep shale extraction unfolds. Snakes get a bad rap, even in the oil and gas industry. Timber rattlesnakes are an issue near drill rigs in the mountain regions of northern and central PA, but are also protected as a vulnerable keystone-state species due to habitat destruction. “So what?” some may say, “what’s so bad about less poisonous snakes?” But snakes are only poisonous if you’re bitten. And the best prevention from a bite is being aware of, and intimately connected to, one’s surroundings.

Journalists Detained, Labeled Ecoterrorists by Natural Gas Workers

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Melissa Troutman approaching a guard shack in Tioga State Forest. photo: Joshua B. Pribanic

By Joshua Pribanic & Melissa Troutman Public Herald journalists photographing natural gas operations in Pennsylvania were falsely detained in the middle of the night by two water truck drivers on an unmarked road in Tioga State Forest and [...]

The Rise of Public Relations at the Expense of Journalism

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The dangers are clear. As PR becomes ascendant, private and government interests become more able to generate, filter, distort, and dominate the public debate, and to do so without the public knowing it. "What we are seeing now is the demise of journalism at the same time we have an increasing level of public relations and propaganda," McChesney said. "We are entering a zone that has never been seen before in this country."