The War

This is an interesting question. Do public watchdog groups have the right to change a work of art?
This story poses an interesting and frustrating question. In essence it says that Ken Burns, the famous documentarian, has neglected to include Hispanics in his 14 hour long documentary The War and several Latino advocacy groups are calling foul and demanding changes to the film.

On one hand we have a group of concerned citizens with a noble cause demanding inclusion in a film that purports examining an historical event in an ostensibly even-handed manner. The group is right on many levels; Hispanics are an underrepresented culture in American history and it is important to acknowledge the advances our country has made because of them.

On the other hand you have a film maker that set forth with specific goals when documenting WWII. Burns only interviewed people from four small towns in America and took six years interviewing those people and finding documentary footage and researching their stories. to change the film now would involve hunting down Latino war veterans from any of those four towns, researching their stories, finding supporting documentary footage and lengthening the film significantly. None of this is a reason not to include Hispanic war veterans though, if a little extra work was all it took there would probably be no debate.

The real problem lies in giving outside influences the power to edit films, even historical documentaries. Should lobby groups be able to influence the media to such an extent? Should squeaky wheels really get the grease? even if those squeaky wheels have a good point? What will happen if a group with less noble goals begins lobbying for changes in documentaries?

As you might have guessed I have no answers to those questions. I believe that documentaries should accurately represent the lives of it's subjects but if the subject is as broad as WWII then it's inevitable that some people will be left out.

feel free to leave comments if you have any thoughts on the subject. Anything hateful of idiotic will, of course be deleted.

I...uh...er...um

from this slate article comes the following bit of wisdom.

"Interjections are suitable for online writing, as I say, because of the way online writing mimics speech. But newspaper and magazine writers who spell out interjections and other vocalisms run the risk of coming off as cute—as in yucky ew rather than adorable awwa. Most egregiously abused are what linguists call "discourse markers"—short sounds (it seems a stretch to call them "words") that speakers use to register hesitation, agreement, encouragement, ambivalence, and other responses. Uh, er, and um, in particular, have been flagrantly overused by feature writers and columnists to signal an impending attempt at irony or humor; the maneuver is now well beyond cliché, somewhere in the neighborhood of desperation. A LexisNexis search of major English-language newspapers for um yields 132 hits in just the last week, including a striking number in various newspapers' coverage of the Grammy Awards:

The Toronto Sun's preview: "Watch for Justin Timberlake pairing up with someone in a duet (which often can be quite, um, revealing)."

The Chicago Sun-Times, looking back on a winner of yore: "the Starland Vocal Band, who gave us the, um, unforgettable single, 'Afternoon Delight.' "

The Oregonian, referring to Christina Aguilera: "the girl who was once known as much for her, um, dirrtyness showed she cleans up real nice, too."

So there you have it. stop using UM so goddamned much. it makes you sound stupid.

I agree that these interjections can become a crutch, a shortcut to sounding conversational but I can see the benefit of these "words." They do indeed make for a looser reporting style and in the world of entertainment news breeziness of reporting has always been valued over say, facts. If I read an article about Iraq that read

"George bush is, um, an idiot."

George Bush might well be an idiot but I'd think the writer was a cutesy dumbshit for putting in that "Um." Somehow the use of interjections is more acceptable when the stakes aren't so high. People covering the Grammies know they aren't reporting anything earth-shattering. People reading an article about the Grammies know they're going to find some useless information peppered amongst some flippant commentary. If everyone is in agreement that the "news" doesn't really matter then why not throw in a "Feh" here and there?