Persistence of Vision

Writing at the Washington Times, Sonny Bunch draws strong connections between James O'Keefe's spectacular videos exposing corruption at ACORN and MPI's pathbreaking work:

The videos were stunning pieces of citizen journalism: effective, simple and elegant.

Add to that list: almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media.

With the exception of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and this newspaper, the media elites almost entirely ignored the story. The New York Times didn't publish its first staff-written story until Wednesday, almost a week after the initial video was posted on the Internet. The Washington Post was just as negligent.

The silence was somewhat shocking: ACORN, after all, had been tied to President Obama, and it was starting to gain real influence in the federal government. There already had been calls for a federal investigation into allegations of voter fraud by the group during the last election.

Certainly this was a story worth reporting, right?

Nothing.

No matter. Mr. O'Keefe and Miss Giles are just the latest in a line of self-starting filmmakers who have taken advice offered by none other than Mr. Moore. When a young, libertarian filmmaker named Evan Coyne Maloney stopped the director of "Fahrenheit 9/11" and the upcoming "Capitalism: A Love Story" on the street and asked him how to break into movies, Mr. Moore responded: "Make your movies, and the people will respond or not respond to them."

Mr. Maloney went into action, making the movie "Indoctrinate U," a blistering look at the problems he perceived on America's college campuses.

Or consider Jake Rademacher. Aggravated by the media coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts and curious to learn more about his brothers' motivation for joining the military, Mr. Rademacher made "Brothers at War," the single best documentary about the fighting men and women who constitute the post-Sept. 11 military.

Then there's Stuart Browning, who realized that the next great public battle was going to be over public health care; he put together a series of videos called "Free Market Cure" and put them on YouTube and at his own site in order to counter the distortions he saw emanating unchallenged from his opponents. His "Uninsured in America" does more to refute the mythical "45 million people in America are uninsured" claim than any magazine article possibly could.

The democratization of film production - the relative affordability of new equipment and editing software - enabled these filmmakers to burst onto the scene without the backing of major studios or journalistic outlets.

Sure, these artists all had help in their struggle: Mr. Maloney and Mr. Browning both received technical support through the Moving Picture Institute, while Mr. Rademacher found allies in Jon Voight and Gary Sinise, both staunch allies of the U.S. military. And Mr. O'Keefe has certainly received a publicity boost through his appearances on the Glenn Beck show and on Andrew Breitbart's new blog, Big Government.

But their ideas and their drive to see their vision realized are what motivated them and inspired them to impact the debate. These men are the vanguard of a new front in the battle of ideas: They have realized that the time for whining is over; the time for doing has arrived.