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Read a statement from filmmaker Cal Skaggs about why he made DEMOCRACY ON DEADLINE, and find out how you can support global independent media with his links and recommendations in the sidebar.
A letter from filmmaker Cal Skaggs:
As I write this in August, 2006, there is no pressroom in the White House compound for the first time since John Adams was president. (It’s closed for renovation.) President George W. Bush has begun traveling without a press plane in tandem, thus slipping away from pesky reporters. (Even when a plane is provided, the fare has become too expensive for many newspapers.) Katie Couric is being groomed to assume leadership of the once great news organization begun by Edward R. Murrow. And cable news networks and tabloids are more interested in this week’s flavor—a new suspect in the Jon Benet Ramsey case—than in the destructive rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. (Apparently there haven’t been enough summer shark attacks.)
Further, hardly a day passes without another dire prediction about the disappearance of newspapers—once so important to Thomas Jefferson he remarked that if he had to choose between a society with no newspapers or no government, he’d choose the latter. But not to worry, we’re told. The Internet will substitute for newspapers. We can ignore A.J. Liebling’s ironic note that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” for the Internet belongs to everyone, and information can flow freely there. But first, without our vigilance, the Internet may not remain free, and much of what passes for information there should be called opinion. Second, a free press that fulfills its lofty democratic purpose is not free. Gathering, organizing, and disseminating the accurate information which democracy requires costs a lot of money. Maintaining foreign bureaus from which reporters can deliver on-the-ground facts, for example, has become a luxury enjoyed by only a few newspapers and broadcasters, because all news outlets are under much pressure to provide higher profits.
When I set out to make DEMOCRACY ON DEADLINE, I believed that the free and independent press envisioned by Jefferson and Madison had become weaker and weaker during my lifetime. I believed that we citizens had also become weaker, expecting to be constantly entertained rather than stimulated or informed. We lapped that stuff up, forgetting the addiction Reuven Frank (once head of NBC News) implied in his anger at market-driven journalism: “The business of giving people what they want is a dope pusher’s argument…. The job of a journalist is to take what’s important and make it interesting.”
I also believed that there were pockets of courageously independent journalists in dozens of other countries that were working against great odds to make their societies healthier and more democratic. I wanted to hold these foreign journalists in relief against the generally tamer American journalists dominating our news media. In sum, DEMOCRACY ON DEADLINE would attempt to portray the work of independent-minded journalists—what they do and how and why they do it—and to explore the intricate connections of that work to the ideals we lump together under the word democracy.
Vaclav Havel summarized a great deal about these ideals when he remarked that Americans conceive democracy as a horizon we always approach though never reach. The fuel that gives us the energy to trudge continually toward that horizon is the fresh and accurate information provided us by journalists who know enough to ask tough, relevant questions and dare enough to follow through until they get the answers. Such journalists also refuse to accept the tired language, the "received wisdom," of the moment, whether that "wisdom" is delivered by the White House or talk radio, left-wing op-ed writers or right wing cable network pundits. Instead, truly independent journalists find fresh language to revivify our faith that there is an ideal horizon of ourselves as free and just persons still worth trudging toward. For if we do not struggle toward it, we will definitely slide backwards. The aim of DEMOCRACY ON DEADLINE is to lure its audience to step a few feet farther toward that horizon and to offer them the pleasure of the company of over a dozen fine independent journalists en route.
As an independent filmmaker I also have my own horizon to journey toward, ever to yearn for. My horizon was summarized by the historian of documentary film, Eric Barnow: "The independent spirit asks the unimagined question and listens to the unwelcome answer." The independent filmmakers' calling allows us to test new ideas and find new worlds in every film we make. But our education and our culture have worn grooves in our minds too, as is true of everyone else. So it is a great struggle for us to imagine a new question or hear a new answer. We independent filmmakers share also the burden and the blessing of always speaking two languages simultaneously—the spoken word and the image. If the image only illustrates the spoken word, as is true of most television, or the word merely explains the image, we've failed in the mastery of the languages we're afforded. But if we are able to speak complexly in both simultaneously, we just might be able to ask a new question that will inspire all of us a few inches farther toward that horizon we call democracy.
—Cal Skaggs
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