An Indie Film Gets a Hollywood Makeover

‘ETHOS’ A feature length documentary hosted by Woody Harrelson.
WOODY HARRELSON hosts this powerful new Documentary Written and Directed by Pete McGrain.
This controversial feature length documentary examines the flaws in our systems, and the
mechanisms that work against democracy and the environment. From conflicts of interests
in politics and unregulated corporate power, to a news media that serves the interests of
powerful elites; ETHOS explores the systems that lead us into over consumption and warfare.
Ethos is the premiere production of Media for Action, a non profit production company based
in Santa Monica, set up specifically to deal with contentious cultural issues as a provocative
response to corporate media. ‘Too often the media celebrates aspects of our society that
belong in the dark ages, while at the same time ignoring or ridiculing progressive thinking or
ideas. As soon as you ask why, you open a Pandora’s Box that is really quite sinister. Many
aspects of the way our systems work almost guarantee our destruction as a society and that’s
what this film is about’. Said Pete McGrain writer/director of Ethos.
‘Proper journalism is about asking tough questions. Having a constant eye to the bottom line or
corporate agendas compromises good journalism. Operating as a non profit lets us negotiate
that dilemma’. Said Isabella Michelle Marles, Co Producer and Founder of Media for Action.
‘Having Woody Host the film is incredible. There are few celebrities that actually walk the talk
and Woody’s integrity and honesty is vital for a film that deals with these highly contentious
issues. The film will obviously get a lot more exposure because of his support and working with
high profile actors who can bring attention to progressive media is a model that we want to
repeat.’ Said Director Pete McGrain.
Ethos is now in post production with distribution yet to be put in place. ‘We have kept a really
low profile on the project for many reasons, but we are now ready to put the film out there. I’m
really excited to see how people respond. Hopefully it will get people asking questions and that
is what it is all about.’ Said McGrain.
For more information, Contact isa@mediaforaction.org
Trailer can be viewed @ www.mediaforaction.org

NEW YORK (Dow Jones)–A group of high-profile documentary makers and film-making associations have asked a federal appeals court to overturn a ruling giving oil giant Chevron Corp. (CVX) access to hundreds of hours of unpublished documentary film footage, saying it infringes on journalistic privileges and has the ability to irreparably damage the documentary-making industry.

In a document filed Wednesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the groups support Joseph Berlinger, the producer of “Crude: The Real Price of Oil,” who has been ordered to turn over 600 hours of nonpublic footage he shot.

Lawyers for Chevron, and two Chevron lawyers facing criminal charges in Ecuador, have argued the footage should be turned over because it will shed light on a corrupt legal process in Ecuador. They argue the deck is stacked against the oil company in a bruising legal fight over environmental damages to Ecuador’s Amazon region. Another filing Wednesday by Dole Food Company Inc. (DOLE) in the case supported Chevron’s position that the footage should be available.

Earlier this month the appeals court upheld a stay on the matter and approved an expedited hearing on the appeal, likely coming next month.

In the court filing supporting Berlinger, the documentary industry says it has an open letter signed by more than 300 people, including high-profile names like Davis Guggenheim and Errol Morris.

It argues that not only should Berlinger’s outtake footage be considered protected by journalistic privilege and the First Amendment, but that if the ruling is upheld, it “will have a chilling effect on the creation of socially important documentary films.”

“If subjects fear that their outtakes may be taken out of context and used against them by their adversaries in litigation, they will be less willing to participate,” the brief reads. “The District Court’s order will significantly impair the creation of documentary films that investigate controversial issues.”

The brief quotes filmmaker Theodore Braun, who has won awards for his documentary on Sudan, “Darfur Now,” saying what he has included in his film was “a matter of life or death” for many of his sources.

Arguing for Chevron’s side of the argument, Dole said Berlinger’s subjects were voluntarily filmed and had signed releases giving Berlinger permission to reveal any or all of the footage. It argued the journalistic privilege of those interviews shouldn’t be held above the serious matters facing Chevron and its employees because the interviews shouldn’t be considered confidential.

The fruit company, which is itself embroiled in legal battles in Latin America, said a documentary shot on its operations in Nicaragua knowingly disregarded the truth. While it was able to use the footage of the film in its own lawsuits, it said if the court protected the “Crude” outtakes under journalistic privilege it would be overstepping the law’s intent.

“Notwithstanding the alarmist claims that the heavens will fall if Berlinger is forced to provide the outtakes to interviews of persons who voluntarily appeared on camera for his film,” Dole’s brief says, “the incursion on the interests of Berlinger, or other documentary filmmakers, is minimal.”

Among the groups signed onto the filmmakers’ brief were the Directors Guild of America Inc.; the Tribeca Film Institute; and two chapters of the Writers Guild of America. Also signing were a litany of well-known documentary-making names including Alex Gibney, an Oscar winner and producer of “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”; Robert Kenner, the director and producer of “Food, Inc.”; and Tia Lessin, a producer for three of Michael Moore’s films.

-By David Benoit, Dow Jones Newswires; 212-227-2017; david.benoit@dowjones.com

In this ongoing look at the future of media, there are few in a better position to talk about it – and Google, Rupert Murdoch, and the SF Chronicle – than Phil Bronstein, the Executive Vice President in charge of Content Development and Editor-At-Large for the Newspaper Division of The Hearst Corporation.

Phil Bronstein

Phil’s also known as a celebrity, but my feeling going in was that I want to focus on the more substantive issue of media’s future with someone I work with, and that I wasn’t interested in adding to someone’s caricature of “Phil Bronstein.”

After gaining one tech point of view, that of Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark, we have a journalist and newspaper executive. We met at Phil’s office at San Francisco Chronicle headquarters in San Francisco.

(The text picks up after the video introduction. The blog post breaks down the most interesting parts of the discussion with summaries in between. The video above is over 27 minutes long.

Zennie Abraham: You having fun?

Phil Bronstein: Yeah. Most days at least interesting if not fun. I get the opportunity to talk to people who are doing things that are outside the normal scope of journalism, but that may have an application for journalists. It’s that intersection that interests me and probably interests everybody.

Zennie Abraham: That why I wanted to talk to you about the future of media, but also wanted to say something. A lot of people I talked to in preparation for this (interview) say you should have got the Pulitzer (Prize for his coverage of the Philippines) not the finalist. Wikipedia got it wrong.

Phil Bronstein: Well, (Wikipedia founder) even Jimmy Wales will tell you Wikepedia’s not perfect. But that was a long time ago and I had a great time as a foreign correspondent. Almost 10 years. I was very happy with my experience there and had a great time doing it. I don’t care at the moment; but thank you. (Laughs)

Zennie Abraham: What’s the future of New Media? I kind of jumped the gun but I could not think of a better person to talk to from your perspective because you span journalism..

Phil Bronstein: I’m old.

Zennie Abraham: Nah.

Phil Bronstein: I’ve been around a long time.

Zennie Abraham: You’re not much older than me Phil. (Well…)

Phil Bronstein It’s a much more complicated question than it seems. I think that everybody’s grasping. There’s a little panic going on; sometimes a lot of panic. I think as I told you before you started videoing, I’ve always been a student of insurgency. I like that.

Zennie Abraham I think I’m the insurgent.

Phil Bronstein: No. No. I mean, I think there are a lot of insurgents around. Some of them technically have nothing to do with journalism but what hey have is they have the ability to plug in what they’re doing into journalism. Journalists don’t necessarily have the time, even if they have the interest in figuring out how to make that happen. For instance the Twitter phenomenon.

Twitter has ways in which they can have a verification process for all of that giant pipe of information they have very second. And verify it in ways that cab be useful for a journalist.

So if you’re a journalist, and you find out that 50 people are tweeting about an explosion in Lower Manhattan, Twitter has the ability or will have the ability to geocode those responses to see if those people are all part of the same social network or maybe not, which indicates that it may be a hoax, maybe not . There’s a process that they can do (in) real time to analyze this data and then be able to say to journalists, out of the 50 words or so, here are the ones that are real.

Phil’s working to determine what role the professional journalist can play in information technology. Bronstein sees the journalist as a fact checker of the future. A person or persons who ferret out the bad information from the good in a sea of it. Phil says that there’s been a big change and that ultimately there’s going to be a bigger one. The question is ‘What’s the future of journalism.’ Not what’s the future of newspaper.

Zennie Abraham What’s the future of journalism?

Phil Bronstein The future of journalism is that there will always be value in someone filtering information professionally…Sort of a nose for things.

Phil says ‘Citizen Journalism’ has been a disaster. “The idea that you go out and give everyone a flip camera”, Phil says, “You can call that a journalist, I suppose. But the idea that there would be this seamless relationship between citizen journalists and journalists is not working.”

Phil says social media gives citizens the chance to contribute, but the results must be verified. There was a push in the recent past to use what newspapers called “user-generated content”, but it didn’t work out because of the information accuracy problem.

The picture he gives is of the news organization as information shaper; “That’s what professional journalists can do. That’s what a lot of professional journalists do very well.”

In a world dominated by opinion and issued by blogs and vlogs, and where some information consumers only go to “certain sources” that fit their political leanings, Phil Bronsteins asserts there’s a need and a desire for information that’s been “cleaned and verified” by pro journalists.

The nature of the interaction between the citizen journalist and the professional is where the person uses a camera to capture something happening and the news organization (like the SF Chronicle or CNN iReport) uses the video once its affirmed.

Revenue concerns in media

“How is all of this monetized” was the question that defined the next phase of our talk.

Phil Bronstein – Well, that is the big question that no one has answered yet, unless you’re Google, Yahoo or MSM. In terms of news and information. You perform a service; people are going to be willing to pay for it in some fashion. That may not be true. I hope it’s true. Ultimately I think we’re relying on some truth to it. The more value we create the more we can collect on that value. The desktop screen or the laptop screen may have past us by already because we’ve made everything free.

Zennie Abraham – Are paysites the answer?

Phil Bronstein – Or maybe it’s the handheld device. I don’t know. I don’t know. What the answer to that question is and I don’t know that anyone have the definitive answer “(does). The Chronicle’s now jumping to embargoed content – We’ll see how that goes.

Zennie Abraham Can you explain to my viewers what that is? Phil Bronstein Yeah. It’s key stories in the Sunday paper. People are being encouraged to go out and buy the paper , the Sunday paper, where they would have seen it on SFGate for free – or get an e-subscription. They’ve seen some action. It’s only embagoed for a few days then it appears on SFGate. Now I think what’s going to happen is very news company is investigating some kind of paygate.

I asked Phil about the failed Newsday paygate, where it gained just 35 subscribers in three months. “Times Select is a disaster. The LA Times had a pay wall and that didn’t work. There are theories that if you get enough media companies doing it at the same time people will have less opportunities.”

He’s not advocating for a cartel. “Rupert Murdoch has threatened to withhold or just kill Google. Not allow Google to use his stuff; the Wall Street Journal, for example. I asked a Google executive all the newspaper companies decided to kill Google, how much would that effect them; he said three percent (of total revenue). They’ve come up to talk to news people at the SFGate; I’ve went down there to talk with them. Everyone’s willing to talk, but I don’t think we have a lot of leverage with the Murdoch threats.

Warren Helman’s Bay Area Project

Phil Bronstein and I talked about The Bay Area News Project. A new “non-profit” news organization that’s financed by San Francisco investor Warren Hellman, that’s upset some local traditional journalists who feel that it’s taking the “news market” away from them since it relies on students in the Berkeley journalism school and partners with the New York Times (not the SF Chronicle). “It’s a high end demographic. We’ll see how it goes. KQED dropped out. We’ll see how it goes.”

The future of media

Bronstein thinks this change will, as I put it, shake out in some way in the future. “Things are happening. Momentum is there. What Murdoch’s doing. They’re all trial balloons he’s testing Rupert just may have something we don’t know about..”

On the matter of celebrity news site TMZ.com, he describes it as “a wonder” and thinks “It’s great..an experiment that’s worked pretty well. “We’re in an interesting time” Phil says, and offers that there will be an interesting tension between the people they cover and what they do.

The future of the San Francisco Chronicle

“The Chronicle’s not closing down anytime soon. I don’t say that because I make the decisions, that’s just my belief and my observation. I want to make that clear. And anything I tell you could be completely wrong or change tomorrow.” Bronstein says that technological change may cause the Chron to “look completely different” than it does now, but it’s still and institution that’s been around for a long time.

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