Vlog killed the video star
We used to watch the 6pm news to see live footage of the big stories.
This worked great for years, but in an increasingly controlled world, forward-thinking people began to question whether what they were seeing on the news was really the full picture.
Just as it has almost everything else in the world, the internet changed all that.
Now we can tune into Youtube, vlogs and any news source we like and get the side of the story we want to see, not a polished edition made for dinnertime viewing.
At the beginning of the ‘War on Terror’, much ado was made about Al Jazeera being the mouthpiece for Al Qaeda. (For more on that watch the fanastic doco ‘Control Room’. You can watch and/or download the whole thing here).
In an increasingly muddy war however, Al Jazeera proved to be more democratic then western media who shy away from the blood and guts reality that face Iraqis and Afghanis every day and that Al Jazeera are not afraid to report on.
But even Al Jazeera has an agenda.
The internet liberates us all though and with a simple Google search you can find some completely unadulterated footage from all sides of the war, including the extremists’.
Trust me, I did it and in my first page of searches I had easy access to a video of the beheading of Nicholas Berg… truly disturbing stuff and I don’t recommend you go looking for it.
As the website that hosts the video says though, it is important it is made available to those who wish to view it.
Back on topic now, I don’t think vlogs are ‘online tv’.
TV is a regulated medium governed by advertising. The one thing vlogs have going for them, is they are completely independent. Vlogs are now just as important contributions to the media as broadcast journalism.
The only problem is that for every Alive in Baghdad, there is a million of these:
