George and Stephen’s Remix: A Candid Murdoch

One thought on “George and Stephen’s Remix: A Candid Murdoch”

1. The goal of our remix video was to make a commentary about media ownership, the “digital revolution” and the politics of all this.

   To begin with, we tried to get at the idea that “the digital revolution” and the open source movement are potentially subversive to the media ownership model of newscorp and other media conglomerates. Murdoch’s line about how young people are dangerous and he is worried about their ambitions should hopefully get at this.

   Next we tried to get at the idea that although social networking sites may seem pretty innocuous, myspace at least is in fact owned by Murdoch (not Tom!) and that he is mostly interested in the bottom line, not constructive values.

   Overall, we tried to get across the message that Murdoch is only interested in money and furthering a right wing political agenda. The video definitely vilifies him (perhaps a little more than we originally intended) but I hope that this vilification serves a purpose: by depicting Murdoch as a crazed villain, we hopefully got the message across that he has tremendous power over media and does not always hold ideal journalistic values.

   In terms of a self-evaluation, I think the video has its funny moments and we do a good job of getting across the basic message of equating Murdoch to a Mr. Burns type. I wish we could have had more substantive analysis of the media ownership structure, but we only had so much to work with.

   Obviously, there are times when the video could be a little smoother (there are abrupt cuts and the like) but we worked hard to make it as smooth as possible. I think the rawness of remix videos (particularly with people talking) is just something that comes with the nature of the medium: one has to voluntarily suspend disbelief.