Here's another Naomi Klein column from today's Toronto Star, posted with her permission. January 13,=20 This Marshall's medium has lost message [By Naomi Klein] When I first met Stephen Marshall 10 months ago, he =20 was complaining that his project, Channel Zero, had not been covered in the Canadian press. He explained impatiently that he was about to give ``birth to a new medium'' - ``an alternative universe'' to broadcasters who are more interested in pushing Diet Coke then helping the planet to communicate. A chronicle of Marshall's trip around the world would be the first instalment of an ad-free global, quarterly video magazine to be sold in stores. It was a fine idea, but Marshall's outrage at the absence of media fanfare was puzzling considering that, at that point, Channel Zero had yet to release anything at all. Marshall, however, understood that hype is not about what you do, it's about packaging yourself with an irresistible news hook. In the coming months, everyone from The Globe and Mail and The Star to this month's Utne and Shift magazines heralded the arrival of a new medium, a new generation, a new revolutionary, a new revolution. Marshall used every clipping to get another, circulating the reviews on posters and on the Internet with lots of pictures of Marshall himself, arms outstretched. He now says the video ``will be revered,'' claiming he was ``chosen'' by ``beings'' in the desert to be the one to expose the corporate media monopoly and its commercial interests. The problem was that Channel Zero's hype was far more high-impact than its actual product. The video faded into the background as journalists chose to fixate on Marshall's club boy clothes and dizzying blizzard of words, and to mix and match from his buffet of self-promotional expletives: ``MTV meets Sixty Minutes,'' ``Sesame Street For Adults,'' ``High-impact guerrilla filmmaking.'' In the flurry of newness, some key questions failed to be asked. Like how can you be chosen to do something so many people are already doing? In the early '90s, a group of African American ``camcorder activists'' formed a troupe called Not Channel Zero under the slogan ``The revolution, televised.'' Roger & Me, TV Nation and Manufacturing Consent, a Canadian film about Noam Chomsky, have reached millions by using innovative film and video techniques to popularize ideas that question the corporate orthodoxy. Channel Zero, on the other hand, has sold 2,500-3,000 copies - a nice start but hardly a ``global reach.'' As for his claim that an independently distributed video constitutes the birth of ``a new medium,'' that's like calling a homemade audio cassette a revolution in radio and declaring yourself Marshall McLuhan. What set Stephen Marshall apart was not his medium or his message, it was his budget. Unlike his predecessors, he had the cash - $2 million - to launch a slickly packaged media blitz. Channel Zero's message was that ``anyone can do this from their basement,'' but during interviews, Marshall was evasive about his own background as the son of a Montreal Steel magnate. He told me ``the universe can give you millions of dollars in a second if it wants to,'' failing to mention his principal donor is Holiday Phelan, heiress to the Cara food empire and a childhood friend. None of this would have mattered had Marshall used the money to help people from all over the world to tell their stories, as he claimed he would. Instead, he kept telling his own story, over and over again. He travelled around the world for the second time - this time Executive Class. He bought a new Volvo station wagon and installed a Zen rock garden in his apartment. Marshall explains that his ``guide'' (the one in his head) told him not to worry about contradicting his anti-consumer message and instead to ``project abundance.'' Sure enough, before the second issue hit the stands, Marshall had blown the money - money that was supposed to put out two more issues. His staff went from 16 to 6 people; some were laid off by fax or E-mail and others were given only two days notice. Marshall, on the other hand, is doing fine. Buoyed by the hype of the last 10 months, he is offering himself up as a youth market expert to the very multinationals he reviled. At a November conference of television executives in Berlin, he addressed the audience not on the need to save the planet from corporate interests, but on how to capture the youth demographic with funky graphics. Not surprisingly, Marshall has been contacted by several major networks, including CBC and CNN - and his guide is telling him to give the multinationals another chance. ``Ted Turner is being presented to me by the universe,'' Marshall says. ``He is the perfect being . . . Ted's a freak like I'm a freak. They're comparing me to him already.'' So the question is: Why does this little saga matter? Unlike most media, Channel Zero actually had a message: a message about the danger of media monopolies and corporate control that many independent filmmakers and progressive thinkers have been steadily building upon and spreading for years. Marshall took that deep desire for justice and used it as his ticket to publicity and corporate success - a new anti-corporate corporate niche market. And we are left with another fast-talking TV savior, trying to sell us something we already have. ------------------- Naomi Klein's column appears on Mondays. Her E-mail address is [log in to unmask] Contents copyright =A9 1996, The Toronto Star. User interface, selection and arrangement copyright =A9 1996 Torstar Electronic Publishing Ltd. To provide feedback or commentary on this site, please write to [log in to unmask] Chris M. 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