This article is a product of the media. Media: Latin for "middle," something standing between -- in this case, I'm standing in between you and Bill Carter. I read his new memoir Fools Rush In, watched his documentary Miss Sarajevo, then conducted a phone interview with him, and now I am sharing what I learned with you. If I do my job well, everyone benefits -- you find out interesting things without having to do too much research, and Bill Carter gets to do something besides field questions all day.
We take the media for granted sometimes. We think it is the only way to interact with the world. When a war goes on, for example, we expect the BBC, CNN and Time magazine will all send reporters to get the story from the front. We tend to forget that what they give us is mediated: they decide what pictures to show, what questions to ask, what portions of answers to report to us.
All this is necessary if you want to understand why what happened for thirteen nights in 1993 was unprecedented. Each night, one or two or three citizens in besieged Sarajevo spoke to an audience of 50,000, 60,000, or 100,000 people. They spoke for a few minutes about whatever they wanted to talk about. What they said was live and unedited. They did not speak to a reporter who then explained to a news anchor what it all meant -- they spoke to a rock crowd. The audiences were there for U2's Zooropa tour. The guy whose idea it was to link Sarajevo to these concerts, and who found Sarajevans willing to go in front of the cameras every night, was Bill Carter.
Full story at @U2.
Posted by eshtine at May 6, 2004 05:17 PM