Eric Blumrich is angry. He's angry at President George W. Bush, at the media and at politics in general. Instead of ranting and raving, the 34-year-old unemployed web designer decided to create online videos to tell viewers what he thinks is wrong with the world.
Blumrich never imagined many people would be interested in his views. But since he launched BushFlash.com at the end of March 2003, he has had 2.8 million unique visitors, and almost 5 million total visitors, from all over the globe. More than 31,000 websites, including shock jock Howard Stern's site and About.com's political humor site, link to BushFlash. Dennis Kucinich used Blumrich's video Anniversary, on the destruction and casualties during the first year of the ongoing Iraq war, in his presidential campaign.
And last week Blumrich participated, along with some of the nation's top political consultants, lawyers and academics, in a panel discussion on online political videos hosted by George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet, or IPDI.
Blumrich said it's a testament to the power of the internet that he was invited. "I'm just a crazy web developer," he said. "I'm a guy who created a web video and it became popular."
During the 2004 election cycle, there's been an explosion in the number of online political videos and animated cartoons, said Carl Goodman, curator of digital media at the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. The museum archives TV political ads going back to 1952 and is now collecting online political videos from campaigns, political parties and individuals.
So far, the museum has 100 online political videos, 40 of which can be viewed in its online Desktop Candidate collection.
Goodman said online political videos have proliferated this year because digital production software, such as Flash, is relatively inexpensive; there's greater access to broadband connections; and there's heightened partisanship this election. "There's tremendous passion that people feel in this election cycle," he said. "People are far more polarized."
Although JibJab's humorous animated cartoon This Land is hugely popular -- and its latest animated video, Good to Be in DC, premiered on The Tonight Show -- the online videos that may have the most influence on the nation's political discourse are those that are overtly opinionated and extremely angry, said Carol Darr, director of the IPDI. "Most of these videos are very partisan and polarizing, and they are meant to appeal to people with strong political views," she said. "They're making politics, which (is) already partisan, more partisan."
Patrick Hynes, founder of CrushKerry.com, said individuals can create more incendiary political videos than the parties or the candidates can. "They can be harder-hitting," he said. "There is less of a threshold of civility and far less backlash from the consequences."
Hynes, a 32-year-old Republican political consultant, launched CrushKerry.com after Kerry won the Iowa caucus. He said the Bush campaign could never have made Torture, the video he made for his site. Online videos, Hynes said, "push the envelope."
Some professional political cartoonists are taking refuge on the net. Mark Fiore, a political cartoonist based in San Francisco, said the internet lets him take stronger stances with his work. Fiore said he left the San Jose Mercury News in August 2001 after newspaper managers pressured him to make his cartoons less offensive and less political. "They wanted me to go easier on Bush," he said.
Fiore syndicates his work to Salon, SFGate, MotherJones.com and AOL, as well as posting it on his own site. In the last few weeks, he said, his site has had about 12,000 visitors a day. His animated cartoon OppositeLand, which was released earlier this month, shows Bush ignoring the facts and bending the truth to fit his own agenda.
"I can say more and be more pointed (online)," Fiore said. "I can take stronger stances. Generally, it's allowed me to say what's on my mind and to get angry, instead of thinking if this will be offensive or not."
Hynes questions the effect that online video, blogs and chat rooms will have on the outcome of the election. "The truth is that the internet just adds more voices to the conversation," Hynes said. "It's just one medium in a whole sleeve of media that will collectively influence the election."
But the net does add to the political discourse.
"It all boils down to the fact that I'm able, for the lame cost of $70 a month (for server space), to present an unfiltered point of view that mainstream corporate media is unable or unwilling to do," said BushFlash's Blumrich. "The problem is that all media is controlled by five corporations. Predatory media consolidation has usurped the Fourth Estate of the American government."
Or, as Blumrich said at the panel discussion, quoting Jello Biafra, lead singer of the Dead Kennedys: "Don't hate the media, become the media."
