Mark Humphrys (politics)

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Media - Cinema


  The law of media diversity: The more expensive media have less intellectual and political diversity

What movie has ever been made about ..

The failure of cinema on the war

TV movies and drama

Fiction

  Movies against the war

Movies supportive of the war

List of movie "bad guys"

Upcoming movies


Cinema and the war

A page about the coverage by cinema (and TV drama) of the modern War on Islamism, the great story of our age.





Make your own Hollywood sign.
From here.




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The law of media diversity: The more expensive media have less intellectual and political diversity

There seems to be a basic law that says: As media gets more expensive and inaccessible, its intellectual and political diversity decreases. The lack of diversity at the expensive end - radio, TV and cinema - is disgraceful compared with the richness and diversity of intellectual and political voices at the cheaper end - the Internet and print. We can rank media from the most to the least intellectual and political diversity:

  1. The Internet - The most diversity of all media. All views can be read in great detail. You can read directly, for example, from the U.S. military, the Project for the New American Century, or the Israeli military. You don't need to read a journalist's spin, or selective quotes. And of course you can read directly from their opponents as well, including directly from Islamist websites and directly from foreign tyrannical government websites.

  2. Print (books, newspapers, periodicals) - Less diversity than the Internet - at least in terms of what you can access unless you are sitting in a national library. Only something like a national library contains similar diversity to the Internet - a bookshop doesn't. Neither does any one periodical. But still there is a reasonable amount of diversity in print in a country like Ireland, say. Many of the views on this website can be found periodically in print in Ireland somewhere, though in much smaller numbers than online. It costs little for a basically liberal-left newspaper to add the occasional neo-con column, for example. It can be easily ignored by their readers - whereas the cost on radio or TV is much higher since it takes up time.

  3. Radio - Some diversity in America. Almost no diversity in Ireland or in Britain.

  4. TV - Some diversity in America and Britain. Almost no diversity in Ireland.

  5. Cinema - The least diversity of all media. There is almost no political diversity in cinema in the world.



The extreme lack of political diversity in American cinema, TV and music.
Politicial donations to the 2008 US presidential election.
From opensecrets.org.




What movie has ever been made about ..

Cinema has the least diversity of all forms of media. There is almost no political diversity in cinema in the world.





Andrew Klavan on the kind of movies that Hollywood never makes, including:
The Surge, Oliver Stone's film about a lonely Bush's brave decision to stand firm against the media and the defeatists like Barack Obama, and press on to victory in Iraq.



Journey from the Fall (2006). Vietnamese with English subtitles.
A movie about the North Vietnam communist democide.
Why in 40 years has Hollywood never made a Vietnam movie about this topic?




The failure of cinema

As I say, cinema is the least intellectually and politically diverse of all media. A very narrow range of political thought gets made into movies, and as a result, movies simply do not address a large number of topics.


Bollywood

Bollywood has made a few movies that touch on Islamic terror. They tend to be a bit inaccessible (subtitles, very long films, musicals, culture gap, etc.).

I have yet to see any of these, so can't say what they are like.



TV movies and drama

As I say above, TV is more diverse than cinema. TV has been covering the war since 9/11. It's cinema's lack of diversity I'm criticising here.




The mass murderer Osama Bin Laden gets finished off in Afghanistan in South Park's "Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants" (2001).
Not until 2012, 11 years after South Park, did we get a single Hollywood movie supporting the American military fight against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.


The worst of TV



The best of TV




The blocking of The Path to 9/11.



The excellent Israeli TV series Fauda (2015 on) shows an Israeli counter-terrorism unit's fight against Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank.
The Israelis are the good guys, but it shows the Palestinian terrorists as interesting and human. Deluded and immoral, but human.



The TV series Tehran (2020) looks good. Have not seen it yet.




Fiction

Novels also attempt to depict the future nightmares we all dream of but that Hollywood cannot or will not depict.

Warning: This section contains spoilers.





The movie Independence Day (1996), directed by Roland Emmerich, unwittingly demonstrates Hollywood's bias.
In the movie, the hero President (making the great speech above) is a fighter pilot (very much unlike the Democrat President in 1996, Bill Clinton).





Cinema - Movies against the war




Cinema - Movies supportive of the war




List of movie "bad guys"




Upcoming movies




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