Zimmerman media coverage, remediation in Game of Thrones, Scorcese on reading cinema, and much more

The reports are based on an ABC News interview with Juror B29, the sole nonwhite juror. She has identified herself only by her first name, Maddy. She’s been framed as the woman who was bullied out of voting to convict Zimmerman. But that’s not true. She stands by the verdict. She yielded to the evidence and the law, not to bullying. She thinks Zimmerman was morally culpable but not legally guilty. And she wants us to distinguish between this trial and larger questions of race and justice.

ABC News hasn’t posted a full unedited video or transcript of the interview. The video that has been broadcast—on World News Tonight, Nightline, and Good Morning America—has been cut and spliced in different ways, often so artfully that the transitions appear continuous. So beware what you’re seeing. But the video that’s available already shows, on closer inspection, that Maddy has been manipulated and misrepresented. Here are the key points.

• This follows Zimmerman filing suit against NBC for defamation:

In the recording heard by NBC viewers, Zimmerman appeared to volunteer the information, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.”

Edited out was the 911 dispatcher asking Zimmerman if the person he was suspicious of was “black, white or Hispanic,” to which Zimmerman had responded, “He looks black.”

• John Nolte at Breitbart thinks that CNN’s coverage of the Zimmerman case establishes the network as “the most disgraced name in news”:

Though Zimmerman and his attorneys have filed a lawsuit against NBC News for the malicious editing of the 911 tape, what CNN did is far worse.

NBC News was attempting to make Zimmerman look like a racial profiler. CNN, on the other hand, was attempting to make Zimmerman look like an enraged outright racist (there was no racial angle in ABC’s fraud). It also took CNN far longer to retract their story than either NBC or ABC.

Moreover, on its own airwaves, CNN would allow the complete fallacy that Zimmerman had said “fucking coon” to live on.

• Dan Laughey offers an idiosyncratically British perspective on “royal baby” media coverage:

Pulling teeth doesn’t do justice to the painful viewing experience accompanying this sort of news manufacture – making news from no news. Even the daily palaver known as Changing the Guard was spun to look like an integral prelude to the long-awaited arrival. And the waiting went on, and on, and on, and the longer it went on, the more desperate and dull the coverage became. Sometimes people complain about the high salaries enjoyed by news presenters, especially the public service variety, but by golly they earnt their crust trying, albeit failing, to sustain the suspense.

• In the New York Review of Books, Martin Scorcese discusses “reading the language of cinema”:

Light is at the beginning of cinema, of course. It’s fundamental—because cinema is created with light, and it’s still best seen projected in dark rooms, where it’s the only source of light. But light is also at the beginning of everything. Most creation myths start with darkness, and then the real beginning comes with light—which means the creation of forms. Which leads to distinguishing one thing from another, and ourselves from the rest of the world. Recognizing patterns, similarities, differences, naming things—interpreting the world. Metaphors—seeing one thing “in light of” something else. Becoming “enlightened.” Light is at the core of who we are and how we understand ourselves.

[…]

Or consider the famous Stargate sequence from Stanley Kubrick’s monumental 2001: A Space Odyssey. Narrative, abstraction, speed, movement, stillness, life, death—they’re all up there. Again we find ourselves back at that mystical urge—to explore, to create movement, to go faster and faster, and maybe find some kind of peace at the heart of it, a state of pure being.

• The Guardian provides an update on Hollywood’s summer of doom:

Despite stormy forecasts, Hollywood appears to be too unwieldly or too unwilling to shift direction towards smaller, cheaper pictures. Guests at Comic-Con learned about upcoming studio productions including Pirates of the Caribbean 5, Thor 2, Fantastic Four 3 and a reboot of Godzilla. The director Joss Whedon came to the event to lament that “pop culture is eating itself” and called for “new universes, new messages and new icons”. He then revealed the title of his next film to be Avengers: Age of Ultron.

• Also in the Guardian, John Naughton writes that Edward Snowden is not the story:

Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world’s mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.

• Lauren Granger at memeburn reports on YouTube’s first ever Geek Week:

The video site is aiming to showcase some geek culture by pronouncing 4-10 August its first ever ‘Geek Week’ and promoting some of the genre’s top channels which cover everything from sci-fi to comics, gaming and superheroes. To do this, its own channel will be featuring videos from users like Nerdist, the official Doctor Who channel, MinutePhysics and more than a hundred others, with every day of the week hosted by a different user. It’ll even include the first trailer for the new Thor movie, The Dark World.

• Chris Cagle at Category D writes about the new documentary Blackfish and “the effaced spectator”:

That said, things kept nagging me. Blackfish does raise some valuable secondary issues – how SeaWorld markets itself, how labor issues are at stake in addition to environmental ones – but as a spectator I kept wanting the film to pursue lines of analysis that it would suggest but never develop.

[…]

In short, if there’s an ur-ideology to the American progressive documentary, it’s that demand-side drivers of political situations (Gramsci’s hegemony, ideology, what have you) don’t matter, it’s merely the supply side of oligopoly, big money, and corporate control. Or to be less political, as a film scholar I can’t help but notice than in a film about the business of spectacle, the spectator is both crucial (SeaWorld viewers provide the vital footage of the incidents) and completely effaced.

• Matthew Manarino at New Media Rockstars looks at 10 years of AdSense:

And what of the YouTube creator? How has AdSense helped or hindered their careers? In most cases, the advertising structure has been a blessing to creators as it’s allowed them to launch careers solely through YouTube. AdSense gave us a new type of celebrity for a new generation.

Creators have had their fair share of AdSense woes in the past, though. Last year, one of YouTube’s biggest names, Ray William Johnson,entered a very public dispute with Maker Studios. Johnson claimed that Maker Studios was holding his AdSense account “hostage” even after he had terminated his contract with them.

• Scott Nye, a Rogerebert.com contributor, has just discovered the lampshade hanging trope:

If you watch big budget entertainments, there’s no escaping these sorts of moments. The trope familiar to the Scooby-Doo generation, in which a few nagging uncertainties are resolved with a “there’s just one thing I don’t understand” kickoff, has now become a motif. Characters must constantly address questions on behalf of a too-curious audience awash in complexly-plotted mega-stories. The movies are trying to plug leaks in a boat before the whole thing sinks—never quite repairing it, but doing just enough to get by.

• Here is the TV Tropes page on Lampshade Hanging.

• Cyborgology contributor Britney Summit-Gil writes about remediation and violence against women in the Game of Thrones tv series:

What I’m talking about here is the unavoidable shift that occurs when content is remediated—that is, borrowed from one medium and reimagined in another. In this case, the content of the book series A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF) is remediated to Game of Thrones, the HBO television series. Some of the differences in this instance of remediation seem pragmatic—remembrances are turned into scenes of their own, dialogue is shortened, characters omitted or altered for the sake of brevity and clarity. I am no purist, and I recognize that with remediation comes necessary alteration for the content to suit the new medium. But other differences speak volumes about our cultural biases and expectations surrounding those with socially-othered bodies—like Tyrion, Sam, and, of course, women. What can we say about these differences? And perhaps more importantly, what do they say about us?

• At BFI Nick Wrigley posted a look at some of Stanley Kubrick’s favorite films, with insight from Jan Harlan:

Why does it matter what Kubrick liked? For years I’ve enjoyed unearthing as much information as I can about his favourite films and it slowly became a personal hobby. Partly because each time I came across such a film (usually from a newly disclosed anecdote – thanks internet! – or Taschen’s incredible The Stanley Kubrick Archives book) I could use it as a prism to reveal more about his sensibilities. My appreciation of both him and the films he liked grew. These discoveries led me on a fascinating trail, as I peppered them throughout the 11 existing Kubrick features (not counting the two he disowned) I try to watch every couple of years. I’m sure a decent film festival could be themed around the Master List at the end of this article…

• Lastly, the Media Ecology Association has uploaded some videos from their latest annual convention which was held in June. These include Dominique Scheffel-Dunand on canonic texts in media ecology and Lance Strate’s talk “If not A, then E“.