How does the opening of Skins represent young people through it's use of media devices?

Intro - Skins shows young people as chaotic, emotional beings by reinforcing a common stereotype in the mainstream media.

Middle - Skins rejects this stereotype and creates a "humanised" representation that takes into account many factors and features multiple representations.

End - In conclusion Skins only represents young people in opposition to adult culture.

At fist Skins appears to support the prevailing stereotype of young people that they are unruly and anti-social. The title sequence shows this by featuring simplistic iconography (alcohol, cigarettes) as a quick and easy way of establishing the stereotype from the beginning.

The mise-en-scene of the girl's bedroom also reinforces this stereotype. It features clothes strewn untidily across the floor, and elaborate trinkets and decorations, the personality of that character is physically projected onto the set before she even speaks. The representation we gain from this is that the character (teenage girls) are very fashion-conscious and give value to their appearance. The scene with the other girl in her bathroom is highly sexualised, the camera tracks across her leg and she's referred to only in terms of her appearance, again this reinforces the same representation.

On the other hand the excerpt features many other young people, some of whom differ from the initial stereotype.

In conclusion Skins only defines young people in opposition to adults. The best example of this is with the music at the beginning of the extract. The style of music is deliberately used as an antagonism for the adult. In this youth are represented not with one single stereotype, nor with many different representations, instead each representation is presented with a common stereotype.

Homework 18/11/2010

From Mr. Gray's blog:

How does Al Jazeera REPRESENT the world Islamic communty?

1) How do the look and layout of the Al Jazeera home pages (English and Arabic) compare? - can you think of any explanations for these differences.

The Arabic homepage is very dense. Content is the top priority and the entire thing is neatly organised. There's a marquee on the top of the page which acts as instant rolling news to direct users as quickly as possible away from the index page.

The English homepage is relaxed about it's layout. It has one simple unifying theme and is not organised efficiently so as to shorten the path between the user landing on the index page and their arrival at content. Essentially this is because the English section of Al Jazeera is only really included as an afterthought, a second priority. The audience is different, those arriving on the english Al-Jazeera will be much more likely to search hard for what they want, as they must have gone out of their way to find the english Al Jazeera.

2) Describe the 'interactivity' of the website (explore several pages) - where do the links take you? How does this compare with a similar website such as the BBC Homepage?


I spent fifteen minutes clicking on random links, Google Translate got itself stuck in a loop and I can't speak Arabic, so I have no idea what I'm reading. I've noticed each page usually has two pictures, and these give handy clues as to what the stories are about. For example a stroy with a picture of some people playing football is probably a sport story.

I quite like the cartoons, this one in particular:

I can't read the writing on the cake, but the message is clear: Zionism and American imperialism are united to divide the middle east (I'm guessing the cake represents the middle east). Having looked at other cartoons on the site they all have a strong arabian nationalist theme.

Al Jazeera features a prominent two-way dialogue. Commenting appears to be anonymous and easy, unfortunately threads are not nested, but it's much better than the BBC, whose response sections are relegated to 'Have Your Say', and recent experiments checking twitter hashtags #HIGNFY for Have I got News For You and #BBCQT for BBC Question Time.

3) Now look at a different media source - Watch Al Jazeera TV - How does the production and style of the reporting differ from the BBC TV news?


Unfornately I can't, because the school computers use Internet Explorer and don't have RealPlayer. I have Firefox on my USB drive, but I left it at home. Instead I watched something on the arabic website about ancient plates. I didn't understand anything but 1 minute 30 seconds seemed a bit long for a report that was basically just someone being interviewed about old crockery. Having watched a second report featuring long shots of people walking up a hill I would say that Al Jazeera tends to focus on trivial events so as to distract people from the actual news. Then again Al Jazeera were fantastic during the assault ont he Mavi Marmara, and I can't really judge without fully understanding what's going on.


DISCLAIMER: I'm actually doing this ~2 hours before the lesson, as Patrick has only just told me about it.

Representation of Islam on the internet

Revolution Muslim. Copy the following address into the browser address bar, that way you can't be tracked. http://www.revolutionmuslim.com/

It's a fundamentalist Islamic website which has it's own quite particular representation of Islam.
EDIT 10/11/2010: I remember reading sometime last week that this site has been taken down by blogger. Perhaps the site administrators should have used BayWords instead?

http://www.inspiredbymuhammad.com/
^it's worth pointing out that the second result for this on Google is a thread on Stormfront. And that thread is blocked on the school internet filter because of 'violent language'.

Muslim Council of Britain
http://www.mcb.org.uk/

Possibly related: this weekend I went to the carnival against racism in London. There was music and dancing, George Galloway and a representative of the Muslim Council of Britain gave speeches. There were some good antifascist activists there, though they didn't have any fascists to stand against, so they came off a bit out of place.

Analyse the ways in which the media represents woman

Part 1

I have chosen to focus on the representation of woman in britiain, using contemporary british film as a case study. I will examine wasp, fish tank and red road by Andrea Arnold. I will also touch on the personal styles of Amma Asante and Lynne Ramsay. In my answer I will consider feminist theories of gender.

Discuss how the film Fish Tank represents and explores youth culture in contemporary Britain.

My initial impressions of Fish Tank were that it featured a very pessimistic representation of youth culture. While Mia's lack of respect for authority is admirable, her relationship with her family appeared to be based on a constant stream of insults and abuse.

HTML5 & Ogg video

Last year Ms. Kate mentioned we'd have to display our practical coursework on a custom website, and that the deisgn of the website could form part of the coursework. As before I'm still enthusiastic about open standards and I've tried a few experiments in implementing them. If the IT department doesn't allow us hosting it might be quite difficult, that's something we can come to later.

Motion Capture

I remember at the start of these holidays I said I'd try to do some motion capture to see if we could use it in a coursework piece, I carried out the test two weeks ago with the help of Matty. As expected there were some problems (but this is why we do tests, so that problems can be anticipated for later):

posting from ScribeFire

I'm writing this post from within Google Chrome with an extension called ScribeFire.
And now that I'm here I might as well keep on updating what's going on.

The radical film archive project is in it's baby steps, I have a page up with a list of all the films to acquire.

Motion capture is still going to happen. Probably.

Jonny is away in the US, Matty is in hospital. Currently undergoing surgery, I wish him a painless recovery.

The new teacher we have, Mr. Gray, knows about RSS feeds and has hosted servers somewhere (I think). This is good news as it allows me much more flexibility in blogging.

And tonight is #oxtuttle again.

Facebook experiment conclusion

Over the last few weeks 17 days I've been running a Facebook advertising campaign pointing to this blog, now that it's over and I've run out of advertising credit I can go over the final statistics.

Chandler's Myth 02

Yes, we're still doing this. It is still confusing. What has changed from last time is that I understand it better now, and I'm not getting Reception and Reference mixed up. I re-drew the notes I made in the lesson (posted below).

Just received word that burning helmets are unlocked for all Halo 3 multiplayer characters for the next 24 hours, brb.

Hello Facebook!

I'm testing out Facebook ads at the moment, and I'm seeing what can be done to them, currently there's an advert pointing towards this blog. So if you're coming in from Facebook, firstly welcome, and secondly I'll set up Google Analytics some time this week so I can measure the incoming traffic from this end.
Also now Facebook has my credit card details. I am not happy about this, given their past record on privacy I don't trust them at all.

EDIT: Just noticed that the ad is 'pending review', because I targeted it at under 18s. Whoops. Still it just shows the power of Social Media advertising; I can specify the exact location, gender and age of my target audience, that's pretty nifty.

EDIT 02: Checked now and the ad is live. Success!

Putting a film poster through Chandler's myth

We have to analyse a British film poster of a film which has been released in the last 2 years.

Chandler's Myth

Last lesson we were meant to put our main task through Chandler's Myth, here's the result:

Trailer research 02

Yesterday I went to the Oxford BarCamp, and I'm sorely tempted to write something about that, however I've neglected the set curriculum for too long. On Friday, me and Jonny sat in the Media room discussing Kinect and watching more trailers, I decided to boil them down to their most basic components:

Guest post by Matthew Springett

Matty was kind enough to write a short piece about noticing my account was left logged on. I found it in the 'draft posts' pile, here it is published with his permission:

Trailer research 01

First post researching trailers for films. I went to the Youtube Trailers site and took all my examples from there:

Newspapers are unaccountable and innacurate.

I'm supposed to be covering research for trailers however a quick glance at my feeds shows that Matty's the only one who's written anything yet. Jonny started a new blog but I don't know the url. I could find out quite easily, but that's for another time, what I want to write about here is how the newspaper model is unaccountable and inaccurate. I rediscovered Angry Mob's new site today and was reading this story.

for Peace and Socialism!

Last week I did Journalism at the Morning Star.
I'm working at the foreign desk, here's a list of stories I've covered there:

Revision and filming

Firstly I've done the basic storyboard and some early filming for that Modern Warfare machinima I've been talking about for a long time.

how to find your blog

I've got lots of free time on this study leave so I've been busy messing around in HTML5 video, and while doing that I somehow managed to stumble across the Blogger API in Google code labs. And I found something to fix a common problem: that a teacher can't find the URL for a student's blog.

Twitter log

During production of the final task we used twitter to communicate with each other. This morning I complied the entire twitter conversation log, hopefully it'll give a small insight into how we worked together. It's also an example of flexible short-form communication being put to good use.

#Voicetweetup

Yesterday evening I went to #voicetweetup at the Jam Factory, I was going to liveblog the event, I was all prepared with my netbook fully charged, and then it failed to find the Jam Factory's Wi-Fi network. Forced to use traditional methods of pen and paper here are my notes:

Machinima in Modern Warfare 2

Here's how to do it on the Xbox:
1. Start a Hardcore match. This gets rid of most of the Heads-Up-Display.
2. Make sure your actors have the 'Cold Blooded Pro' perk enabled. This means their username doesn't come up when seen by the player designated as the cameraman.
3. The cameraman should equip a flashbang and hold down the left button. This pulls back the character's arm in the motion of throwing it, but as long as you don't relese the left button the character remains in that position without releasing their projectile. This leaves the screen completely empty and ready for filming.

I discovered step three when wandering aimlessly with Matthieu around Overgrown, and it's essential. It's also useful to note that very different from Halo you'd need a minimum of 2 Xboxes either conected locally or over Xbox LIVE. All the filming takes place in real-time so you can't rewind time to re-shoot the same events again and again.
You also have very little control over the costume of your character.

Despite all that it's not impossible so people will definitely attempt it sometime in the future.

we broke the rules

There was one shot which we thought had violated the 180 degree rule so I went back to the saved scene, viewed it from above and marked on our camera positions.

In conclusion we did break the 180 degree rule, but nobody watching the film actually noticed.
To justify the breaking of the rule it was the only way that shot could have been set up, otherwise the second monitor would have gotten in the way. The shot was also necessary to break up the conversation by viewing it from another angle.

Evaluation

Here is the filmed evaluation on YouTube:

As usual there were some points I missed out on my two and a half pages of notes. I will explain them here.

Storyboards

Storyboards are avaliable on Jonny's blog, cross-posted here:
All the images are hosted on Jonny's blog so if they go down it's his fault.

Final task and credit list.

This morning I uploaded the final task to YouTube:

Final task complete.

Jonny came round yesterday and went over the changes I made, he didn't like the running scene and I wasn't entirely happy with it myself so we re-shot it again with our protagonist running slower and with different camera angles (that's a temporary whiteboard in my office, ignore the writing on the top left). We saw that we might have broken the 180 degree rule during the conversation between Nick and the cosmonaut, so thought it best to add in a previous shot for no other purpose than to ease the 'flow' of the conversation and stop the audience getting all confused.

Machinima setup

I was looking through my camcorder and found a picture of Jonny recording some machinima in my kitchen:

It shows what our machinima setup looks like. Also some good news is that the final render worked and I'm uploading it to an external server right now. From there Jonny will review the film and make comments. I joined his Xbox LIVE Party last night and he said he'd be free next week, then we'll go through what would be the 'final  edit'. In the meantime I might try a machinima montage in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Matthieu seems incredibly keen on trying it.

Editing update 02

I 'animated' the Gmod models, it took a while and I had to make a few attempts before I got the perspective right.
The timeline now looks like this:

A noise filter has been added to every individual clip, video track 5 contains an overlaid border, I've even started adding some text for the credits. I asked lutragem nicely whether we could use her music and she accepted. And I downloaded some sound effects from freesound (it was me who got them because I have an account there).

How are we making machinima?

Last lesson Ms. Parish said something like 'I like what you've done but I have no idea how you've done it'. Here I'll try to put that right by explaining what machinima is and how to use it as a film technique. If you look at the URL of the last post you'll see that was what I originally intended to slip it in there, I decided it's worth a full post. I'll also try my best not to be patronising.

Editing update

Firstly for the update of what we've been doing, we've been editing well and encountered few problems. My laptop was restored. I delegated most of the things we wanted to include to the editing stage, so now that we're here the film has changed drastically, so much even that I asked for scene 3.1 (or 2.2, Jonny has the storyboards) to be re-shot because we're going to add a new model from Gmod. I know this'll be the third time we'll have re-shot the same scene but that's how we're working at the moment. Having started with a storyboard, script, scouted out various locations in-game, and Jonny's research, we then made the first film which I suppose would be the draft, then I re-shot the scenes and that would be the 2nd draft, what we're working on now is far from the final piece, we still have some things to sort out:

Moar research

If you must know I'm doing this now instead of my film because my laptop died, it's currently sitting on the kitchen table while I back up the hard drive, and it will be on the kitchen table for the next 6 hours or so. In the meantime I re-recorded the shots we needed (and added some more) in compressed MotionJPEG format. We now have 24 shots and they're coming out slightly sharp and pixelated but apart from that they're much easier to work with than before.

Filming update

On Friday lunchtime (when everyone else was doing Sport Relief) we set up a bluescreen in the drama department and began filming the first bit of footage, there was some problem because our actor was busy (at Sport Relief, probably) but I stepped in and acted instead:

Script for sci-fi main film task.

Our film begins with a long establishing shot of space. Our narrator speaks.
"In the year 2058 Human Civilisation developed the ability to travel among the stars".
Then we have a grand orchestral score as a hornet floats across the top of the screen [reference to beginning of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope].
"They didn't like what they found."
The hornet is hit by a lazer [reduce the damage enough to make it insignificant].

Research for main task.

I should explain this post to start off with, during today's lesson Jonny voted that we try a science-fiction black and white silent machinima, I agreed. After the lesson we both met on Xbox LIVE and messed around on the Forge for about 45 minutes. We played on the maps we would use and messed around with the inbuilt filters. You must understand that this is great because it includes actually playing through video games... for educational purposes! I settled on the map Orbital and forged it with an inbuilt colour filter (that means the filter you're seeing in these screenshots was added in real-time as part of the Bungie game engine). I should probably mention here that the Orbital map is only available as part of the Mythic Map Pack 2 as included in the Multiplayer disk with Halo 3: ODST (you have no idea how much I'm enjoying this). Without further ado, here's the research:

Preliminary task and it's evaluation

The preliminary task was edited and uploaded on Jonny's account, here it is:

Music for pre-lim task cleared.

This is an intermediary post to say that I've finished my evaluation, as a Vlog, if that's okay, it's uploading at the moment and will be on my channel in 5 hours or so. It's better than my previous vlogs because I went back to my previous practice of meticulously editing out all the 'um's, 'ah's and anything else I didn't want. This was because I also returned to my previous practice of converting my video from my camcorder in MP4 format to DivX format as soon as I got them onto the computer (I have the DivX converter, and more surprisingly I got it totally legally and paid for it with actual money). MP4 files don't work well with MoviePlus X3, I might download the 3ivX codec to fix that sometime.

You slipped on a banana! Lol!

You might have read a few months back that we did a filming task in school, well on Friday I was able to get it off the Macs and onto YouTube.
I've also got a vlog-review of Prince of Persia: the Two Thrones on the Wii uploading at the moment, I'll post it on Twitter when it's done and and I'm back from this afternoon's lesson, or you could subscribe to my channel and watch it while YouTube's processing it.
I'll add captions to it, after it's done.

Prelim task filming.

On Thursday 4th of March we went to a pub to film our historical drama. I had costumes and a camera and a bike to take us there. What I hadn't researched was whether a pub would be open on a weekday morning. I thought it would be easy to film because the pub would be virtually empty of customers, so it was closed. As a last ditch attempt we went to a church around the corner (churches are good for historical setting because they're old and sort of generic). The church too was closed.

Storyboard for prelim task.

This is the storyboard for the prelim task that me and Jonny made:
EDIT: It won't upload. Will re-try at home...

2nd EDIT: Wahey! Tried at home and it's done.
We decided to go with the Victorian historical drama, because we don't really watch or like Romantic films.
3rd EDIT: Jonny put up his storyboard too, it's the precursor to this one.

Historical genre for film task.

Historical
It is 1884 and young master Filpott is meeting his friend Neville Baker at the local Tavern after a long day ploughing the field. He enters, the room is thick with smoke from the roaring fire, men drink and wenches dance [we don't have to film this, just get the sounds]. Filpott crosses the tavern and sees Neville, whose face is smeared with factory grease. Neville raises his tankard of ale in greeting.
Neville: How be the Harvest this season?
Filpott: Poor.
Neville: Aye, it's hard times.
And they stare sullenly at their glasses, take one long swig and then the world fades black.


Notes: We would add a monochrome filter to this as an effect and make the video look older.

Fantasy genre for film tasks.

Fantasy.
Mighty Thungrin the fierce warrior returns from his epic quest. He unloads his weapons and tells his great tale. While he describes how he slew the fearsome dragon of sirdahon his wife 'hum's and 'ha's. He declares he shall drink until he is unable to stand. His wife then turns to him and asks him if he could put out the milk *loss of dramatic tension*. He takes a swig of ale and declares he will do it that very moment, he then yawns and lies down snoring on the table.
Thungrina whispers "sleep well good husband". The next day Thungrin wakes up, goes outside bare-chested and strokes his scraggly beard while gazing at the sunrise. Then a messenger approaches him and says that last night the town three leagues away was had been cursed with a terrible black spell. The inhabitants were eating one another's brains and shuffling slowly towards the surrounding villiages. Thungrin accepts themessenger's pleas for help and turns to the camera and roars... it's
THUNGRIN AND THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE.

And that was what I did in my Film Editing class.

Research on opening credits of at least 5 films

District 9 [IMDB link]

300 [IMDB link]

Police Academy 2: their first assignment [IMDB link]

FullMetal Alchemist: Conqueror Of Shamballa [IMDB link]

the Shawshank Redemption [IMDB link]

COMMENTARIES ARE FORTHCOMING.
Jonny will do them.

Commentaries are done, well done Jonny.


Also, this is a trailer for a film featuring the musician 'Jay-Z', it was linked on the Guardian PDA Media Blog under the caption:

Not exactly the world's first grainy chiaroscuro music documentary, of course, but it should be a big hit with Jay-Z fans and media studies departments everywhere.

So I'm doing what Jack Schofield says to and publicising it, stop frowning like that, you know it's relevant!

Cover lesson shot-reverse shot and other things...

Find the defenition of shot-reverse shot and find an example.

Says Wikipedia:

Shot reverse shot (or shot/countershot) is a film technique wherein one character is shown looking at another character (often off-screen), and then the other character is shown looking "back" at the first character. Since the characters are shown facing in opposite directions, the viewer assumes that they are looking at each other.

Used in conversations. Our example (I'm working with Jonny) is here from YouTube, apologies if the sound is somewhat obscene. We have no sound here, and anyway if we did it would be a little rude to use it and none of us have headphones. Next we have to look at the details of the preliminary task and see where it would be appropriate to use this type of shot and why:

A continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character with whom he/she exchange a couple of lines of dialogue.

They exhange lines of dialogue, shot reverse shot would be appropriate to use there.
We'll publish the next task as a seperate post, keeps things nice and tidy.

Various important things of note

I'm aware there are numerous things I've got to go over when I've got the time (the two days before the return to school). Things to mention: Battleship potemkin and HTML5 video. BBC website redesign? Justification for width increase. Astro Boy, XBLA, Moar internet-people on Twittr, 140 characters? Include Machinima video. This is going to be quite a heavy and disjointed post so bear with me.

Battleship Potemkin
Currently available to view on my personal blog. I tried out HTML5 video and it works fine in Google Chrome. It doesn't work in IE because Microsoft are pushing Silverlight and are always behind standards anyway. If it worked in Firefox you could watch it in full screen but it doesn't work in Firefox because I tried adding the MIME types for Ogg video to my apache server and it hasn't recognised it so I'm stuck. The reasons for my enthusiasm in hosting old russian films came out of my realisation that I paid for 1,500 Gigabytes of bandwidth and I've barely used any of it, and that I think Eisenstein's films are just great because they're easy to understand and I liek teh Communism and Lenin and Che Guevera. If you don't have Google Chrome (and you should because it's awesome) here's a direct download link. I'll probably soon dismantle that archive and rebuild it so don't count on those links after a month. I encoded those videos in ogg format because it's not encumbered by any patents. I support internet Piracy and think patents suck so it's only fitting that revolutionary cinema is shared in an open, patent-free format.

DISQUS

This post is about the DISQUS commenting system I've stuck on here. I originally saw it on @garrynewman's blog, then on @graemehunter's blog. Seeing as it's a new trend I'll get ahead while I can before the major blogs kick into action.

the 1% rule

I came across this article while perusing the Guardian Media Blog the other day. It explains the 1% rule, and here it is:
If you have 100 people online at any given moment, 1 of them will create a piece of content, 10 of them will interact with it (comment, vote up, rate ect...), and the other 79 will passively view it without contributing.

Want more statistics?
5% of Twitter users are responsible for 75% of the site's tweets.

I'm probably not part of that 5%, I do tweet an awful lot though.
Right, that's me done for media today :)

How are hospital staff represented in the opening episode of Bodies?

An underlying theme I've noticed so far of the Bodies series is that things regularly go wrong. It's not the kind of drama where they just 'examine hospital life' there has to be constant unexpected events to keep up a story. There are some shots through blinds which give the audience this feeling of spying on the hospital. I think the word to describe it is 'voyeuristic'. The fact that the audience has to observe the events as thought they are unwelcome guests implies that there's some secrecy and gives the hospital a sinister air (this representation is passed down to the hospital staff).

Analysis of the Guardian website.

Take note that because this is at school I'm viewing the website on Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer 6 is an 8 year old browser that is incapable of displaying much of the rich media content on Guardian.co.uk
Despite this liability I can see that the main stories are organised into short blurbs which lead the audience on to the full article. Below that it resorts to just listing headlines. This leads the audience quickly on to the most important content. The front page of Guardian.co.uk is similar to the front page of the physical paper, it's function is to draw the audience on to specific stories, like a channel to content.

News narratives

When the Haiti earthquake hit it was widely reported in the news. I've recently come into contact with the idea of a 'news narrative'. Some news stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. They conform to certain conventions that make them easier to report. The events are sometimes predictable. There's a hero, possibly a victim, and an evil villain.

For example: Celebrity A is seen courting Celebrity B. Celebrities A & B declare undying love for one another. They marry, Then they either have a child, or they divorce, or do both. It's easy to follow and the romantic theme holds the attention of the audience.

Little girl is lost on holiday in Portugal, parents are distraught. There's a huge emotional outcry. Then when everything seems hopeless people report sightings (due to the increased media attention). Conspiracy theorists theorize and the renewed interest sparks the curiosity of the audience. Eventually the police investigation ends, the case is archived and the inertia runs out.
Episode 2, series 2 of Newswipe explains this a bit better (video later, perhaps).

PCC editor's code of practice.

I've 'done the rounds' on my feeds for today and noticed this came up twice. It's a petition to change the PCC  editor's code of practice, here are the proposed amendments:

1. Like-for-like placement of retractions, corrections and apologies in print and online (as standard).
2. Original or redirected URLs for retractions, corrections & apologies online (as standard).
3. The current Code contains no reference to headlines, and this loophole should be closed immediately.
4. Sources to be credited unless they do not wish to be credited or require anonymity/protection.
5. A longer and more interactive consultation period for open discussion of more fundamental issues.

Incidentally I still have the PCC code of practice in my room somewhere, not quite sure where in my room but I remember that I didn't throw it away.

1 hour timed essay on whether local papers fulfill a more important social fuction than national papers.

The local press is at the grassroots and closer to the people it's reporting about. The content is much more relevant to the audience. The social value of locally relevant news is higher than that of national, generally relevant news. This is because people need to know what's happening around them. The events occurring nationally or overseas may not be as important.

The power of the press release and two-tier social media.

Our lesson on Thursday was about local and national newspapers. I made the point that local newspapers are (I'm making a huge generalisation here based upon no evidence) underfunded, and have underpaid journalists. These journalists have little time to check sources and tend towards just re-writing press releases. This bad journalism actually can work in the favour of certain groups.
For example, in December last year I was involved in a movement which sought publicity about an event, to achieve this they sent a press release to the Oxford Times and the Oxford Mail. The Oxford Times dutifully printed the main details about the event in their following edition.
On Thursday evening I went to another meeting with a different group who also proposed using this tactic. I've now recognised that press releases are a powerful tool and when combined with a lazy journalist can be used to achieve free publicity.

Lola Rennt

Last night I watched run Lola run, it's a German film, and it's significant because it blends perfectly the hermeneutic and proairetic codes (from Roland Barthes's book S/Z). The base story is a fairly simple one: a girl called Lola must deliver 100,000 marks to her boyfriend Manni before 12:00. From there it branches out before the eyes of the audience into the events which occur as Lola tries to procure this money and cross town to reach her boyfriend in time. Each of these events has their own sub-plot, sometimes they're completely unrelated to the base story, sometimes they return later in bizarre twists. Some of the pivotal characters involved in these events are hinted at in the opening 4 minutes.