Blogumentary

Chuck Olsen. <i><a href="http://blogumentary.org/" target="new">Blogumentary.org.</a> 65 minutes.</i>

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This playful jaunt through the blogosphere is aptly shot in an informal, first-person, all-access style. Director Chuck Olsen, an avid blogger himself, used his own blog to document the making of this film, posting scenes while it was still in production.

Olsen sees the blog movement, with its watchdog agenda, as a revolutionary means of returning the media to its “rightful owners” — the people — after more than four decades of TV-news pollution. Blogumentary spans a wide web of material, with stops at Howard Dean’s “geek-powered” campaign headquarters and the suburban patio of a right-wing blogger for Power Line.

The film examines the considerable role that blogs played in forcing Trent Lott’s resignation and, more recently, in Rathergate. Along the way, we hear from Entertainment Weekly founder-turned-blogger Jeff Jarvis, web philosopher David Weinberger, We the Media author Dan Gillmor, and front-line war correspondent Stuart Hughes.

Like Olsen’s own blog, Blogumentary is highly personal, particularly when the filmmaker turns the camera on himself in the middle of the night to capture his grief over having accidentally deleted his site. Taking a cue from William Hurt’s network anchor in Broadcast News, this foot soldier in the “pajama brigade” proves he’s not above keeping his own tears in the final cut.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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