Yesterday we tweeted my friend Herman Wasserman’s guide to the media on how to cover Nelson Mandela’s hospitalization (it’s good advice if you’re a journalist). This morning I asked Nathan Geffen, a South African media activist (and author) whether we could republish here his post on the “when Mandela goes” meme. Geffen is one of the key people […]
The Maasai bear the weight of being one of the original noble savage dream tribals that the British and the Germans salivated over (in India, the Sikhs play the role of the exotic, animal protein-loving warriors, whose aggression got recruited into the Crown’s loyal service). The Maasai are such a standard-bearing cipher for all that […]
To British eyes the polished, high-gloss viral campaign of Invisible Children’s 26 minute video–with its high-end production, fast paced edits and expensive motion graphics–clearly favors the grabby style of American political campaign imagery, a style that is increasingly adopted in the British party political broadcasts too. It’s an immersive, yet distinctly oppressive style of polemic film making. But how are the rest of British media reporting and analyzing this business?
