David Hume Kennerly, a Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist, is offering a digital camera to everyone running for governor of California so they can record their campaigns. I think we need to go much further. Photojournalism is a largely objective art, in that a camera can occasionally happen to be in the right place at the right time to capture an image of real truth. Photos taken by or of candidates are like home movies that only accidentally tell us something. We need to enable citizens to capture their experience of the candidates, which can tell us something about the issues and the people contending to lead the state. And the thing is, if the six million or so people watching CNN right now were to contribute $50 a year, a people's CNN could be launched and run in a radically new experiment in news capture and dissemination.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at September 23, 2003 09:11 AM | TrackBack