Feb 20, 2011
Minority, indie filmmaking will suffer in wake of federal cuts: Consortium board member
Eric Easter, a board member of the National Black Programming Consortium, has a column on the Root website pointing out if CPB funding is indeed axed, "As usual, the hardest-hit victims won't be PBS or NPR; they'll be the people on the ground – minority and independent filmmakers and digital storytellers for whom public grants are often their sole source of funding. We can't allow this to happen."
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4 comments:
The only person that's going to suffer from the loss of federal funding is Ken Burns. The civil war doc was great but do we really need another Burns documentary? National Parks wasn't so great, it seems as though Burns is running out of subjects that interest him and do we really need to spend more federal funds to him happy? Indie film makers find private financial support and Burns should too. Without federal funding, the sky is not going to fall down, if the market place wants PBS and NPR, they will support it.
Ken Burns' shows are underwritten by General Motors, wingnut teabbager moron, and have been for many years, NOT the CPB. Why don't you do some rese research, like your idol Crybaby Beck keeps telling you to?
And when are you going to start signing your name? What are you trying to hide?
Locally, I can think of one film maker who would of been affected, Frank Popper who produced the documentary "Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?" based around a local congressional race pitting an underdog versus a Missouri political dynasty (Russ Carnahan). It would later recieve enough reviews and awards to be featured on PBS's "Independent Lens" program, and I think those artists are the ones most affected...
Of course, whether we assume Republicans actually watch PBS...I'm not going to go into that...but it is easier to make cuts in programs which we don't have attachments or experiences in...
I wish you were right. But if you were being completely honest you would admit that "the marketplace" is not the great surfacer of truth you want it to be. You need only look to the commercial box office to understand that. What sells is often not the only thing we need. And public media is about need, it's about information we must all have ready access to if we are to be on the same page - free from commercial bias/flair. It is not perfect, actually far from it, not as diverse as it could be, or even as self-sufficient as it might be, but have no doubt the end of publicly funded media will be the end of multiple perspective in media. Ironically Ken Burns is probably the only one who will be fine once CPB is defunded; the thousands of indie doc filmmakers who make less "salacious" content however, will be tossed aside.
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