A Published Article

My eighth article for the brilliant Media Magazine has just been published in the December 2011 issue.  You can get yourself a copy from here.  It's aimed at A Level and BTEC media students but I'm sure anyone with an interest in documentary (particularly in recent years) could find it interesting.  My article is titled Attacking America: A Decade of Documentary Dissent.  

The issue also contains an article from the always interesting James Rose on the politics of the slasher movie.  


This follows my articles in previous issues on:

1. Participating in a reality TV show (December 2009)
2. Sacha Baron Cohen's mock-docs (April 2010)
3. Stop-motion animation (September 2010)
4. Michael Moore's Documentaries (December 2010)
5. Ghetto Culture in City of God and La Haine (February 2011)
6. The collaborations of Fincher and Pitt (April 2011)
7. The cinema of 9/11 (September 2011)

Here is a brief sample of the new article:

Over the past decade, America, arguably the world’s only remaining superpower, has taken a beating.  September 11^th 2001 brought an unprecedented attack on home soil with economic, political and military targets leading to over 3000 deaths.  Less than a month later, America went to war with Afghanistan and their forces are still there a decade later.  Less forgivably, President Bush and his neo-conservative cronies then set their sights on Iraq in the continuing campaign known as the War on Terror.  Starting an illegal war to find Weapons of Mass Destruction that never materialized, American soldiers found themselves dying for a cause that the folks back home soon stopped supporting.  Hurricane Katrina hit the coast in 2005 and was the costliest natural disaster in the history of the USA.  Two wars costing billions of dollars a year, increasing frequency and costs of natural disasters and a deregulated financial industry ended up feeding into a huge economic crisis that caused a global recession, bank bailouts, a huge rise in unemployment and over a million people losing their houses since 2008.  Documentary makers of the world with their tiny budgets began flinging anything they could at the bullying, greedy and corrupt Goliath that America had become.

 Go get yourself a copy here.