I’m a voracious consumer of news – everything from Truthout, the Wall Street Journal to gizmodo… occasionally even sports.

Two years ago I bought the iPhone with the goal of being able to keep constantly up to date on breaking news. It did its job – reading short blogs, AP updates, listening and watching podcasts were all easy to do and as long as I remembered to sync everything in the morning I was set for my ridiculous commute in the morning (1.5 hours underground). But for real news, lengthy articles and for books the iPhone just wasn’t cutting it and my paper copies of the Wall Street Journal were just being dropped in my recycling bin.

So three months ago I went to the Barnes & Noble nook, an e-reader with auto-updating newspapers similar to the Amazon’s Kindle. For books it was great, I knocked out 60 pages of usually unreadable Human Rights Watch reports, but for the newspapers it was like reading an rss feed, or a blog on a Tandy computer… slow and gray and darker gray.  So I returned to my iPhone, squinting.

And so my final option was the tablet on the mount, the supposed savior of my occupation, the Apple iPad. So was this glorious slab of 9.7 inch glass and aluminum, sent down from high by our black turtlenecked God going to save journalism as we know it?

No. And it’s not the iPad’s fault, it’s a spectacular device. But it’s just a device.

It’s the Content, Stupid

In the fight against the internet and blogs, newspapers and magazines didn’t stand fighting chance. We all quickly fell into the delusion that news can and should be free but as any working (or laid-off) journalist will tell you – real journalism is expensive, and it’s not going to our paycheck it goes to our work. Currently I’m planning a film in Alaska, without paying myself or my co-producer our minimum budget is $10,000, no one’s covering those costs except my credit cards.

So when I hold in my hands the ‘future of journalism’ and I don’t see a place for low budget or non-profit investigative journalism, I worry. Currently the minimum cost of making an ‘app’ for the iPhone or iPad is running $2500 – something that most low or no budget news sites can afford… $2500 is someones pay for 2 months.

On the profit centric side of journalism there is a handful of apps that make the iPad worth it.

The iPad is made for programming like NPR offers and they have built an app that is perfect – the front page shows todays programming but tap on an article and it gives you the option to download the podcast and subscribe to it via iTunes.

The Associated Press, the leader in the movement against free news, offers a limited but potentially good app heavy on the video and but disappointing when it comes to photos which are limited to a quarter of the iPad’s screen size. Right now news agencies are the last place for professional photographers to make a living – showcase the work that you have, don’t cripple it.

BBC and Reuters both get the iPad showcasing their strong points – audio for the BBC and photo/video for Reuters. The BBC offers live radio as you are viewing the app, but as with all the apps (skype included) it shuts down the moment you try to work on something else.

Far and away the strongest app is from the Wall Street Journal which is, as of now, the only one that really works for an information consumer. The WSJ app (free, but there’s a paywall for the newspaper) nearly makes the $500 iPad worth it, the layout is as close to a newspaper as I’ve found other than the web page for the NY Times – which doesn’t have an app other than their glorified rss feed application. It also allows for you to view a weeks worth of newspapers without an internet connection, to me the most practical news application currently offered for the iPad.

Which brings me to why I am returning this tremendous device.

Right now, it’s not worth it. I’m one of the seemingly few media consumers that’s willing to pay for my news and the iPad doesn’t make it worth my while.

Like most consumers (those outside of the Google campus) I don’t have wifi everywhere I go. I live in NYC and I went to three different coffee shops before I found one that had the WiFi I needed. Once i was on the network the device worked brilliantly, and most importantly, quickly. If I went to my home town Syracuse, NY I’d be out of luck, or at best I’d have to pay for access.

The iPad 3G will solve those problems, but at a starting price of over 600 bucks, we’re getting ridiculous, that’s why having access to contact off the web is key.

Now is this Apple or the content providers fault. Personally I’d lay blame on the provider.

Apple has made an amazing media content viewer… now it’s up to the news agencies to make content to fill it.

Zach Roberts is a documentary filmmaker who has worked on films with Greg Palast, Robert F. Kennedy and Jesse Jackson. His production company, InsurgencyUSA, is currently working on a film about Sarah Palin, Alaska and the environment called The Rogue Candidate (http://www.theroguecandidate.com) with co-producer Keri Melshenker.

Now, I’ve never been a big follower of the ‘peak oil crowd’ – a group of people that have the same passion as 9/11 truthers. At my last job I received many an e-mail from peak oilers that contained threats. For that reason, over the years I have chosen to stay away from the conversation all together, merely shrugging my shoulders when the topic comes up at conferences and talks that I’ve attended. “I’m not an expert” then following that with “Hubbard’s “peak” has been moved forward several times,” and adding finally – now with a raising of the hands “but that’s just what I have read,” and then quickly changing the subject to something about Bush’s oil wars.

There is no doubt in my mind that there is a peak – if we have reached it already it does not matter – what is important is that at the current rate of global economic expansion an oil collapse is imminent. And this is where I begin with Michael Ruppert and Chris Smith’s new documentary ‘Collapse.’

Mr. Ruppert began his adult life with a “Q” clearance (above top secret) – essentially inherited from his father, an Air Force officer and his mother a cryptographer for Army Intelligence. Michael was given the “Q” since he could have potentially look in his fathers briefcase as a child. If genetics meant anything for an investigative journalist – he’d would have started out as one of the best. They don’t of course – but Ruppert set out to spend the next 30 years building a resume the hard way.

As a young officer in Los Angeles in the 70′s, he claimed to be approached by the CIA to help smuggle drugs into the U.S. That was a turning point for him and over the next three decades he would become one of the most prolific and well known underground journalists, starting his own newsletter ‘From the Wilderness,’ and eventually a website of the same name. Some of the stories that he has broken – or at least was the first to publish – include the Pat Tillman scandal, Cheney’s environmental meetings, and of course CIA’s drug dealings. You can see him here confronting CIA Director John Deutch at a Los Angeles town hall meeting.

Collapse opens with Ruppert sitting in what looks like an abandoned building, smoking a cigarette, he will smoke many of them by the end of this film. Honestly, by the end of Collapse I felt like picking up smoking again – what did i have to lose – the world was ending as we know it. Dire predictions are this man’s strong point, what worries me (and should worry you) is that he seems to be so often right case in point – the economic collapse of 2008. Ruppert sees this not as a one time dip but as the coming of a greater depression. He seems to scoff at the idea that human ingenuity will be able to pull us out of this one – essentially we are in too deep.

Ruppert, explains ‘peak oil’ – the idea, put simply that we have hit the top of the bell curve of crude oil discoveries – not now, or even as the new numbers suggest in 2005 but in the 70′s – Hubbard’s earliest predictions. If he, and Hubbard are correct we are very near the collapse of the oil culture. This is the collapse that he’s really talking about – not the recent economic one but the point when oil – the thing that everything, and I mean everything is built with becomes too expensive for us to continue.

“10 hydrocarbons for every ONE calorie”

This, and that seven gallons of gasoline go into every tire are the two facts that he continually goes back to when explaining why we’re are in such deep sh*t. Ruppett isn’t ok with just knocking the present – point by point he knocks down the alternatives – “electricity is not an energy SOURCE” – bashing electric cars as an alternative to petrol run autos and “[there is] no such thing as clean coal.” To call him blunt is an understatement. I would thoroughly enjoy a debate between Ruppert and Al Gore about the future of energy policy in the U.S. -although I may not agree with all of his pronouncements his ‘wake up and smell the oil fumes’ attitude is well needed within Al Gore’s current soft and fluffy cap and trade environmental movement.

“Don’t Panic”

In Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ we follow a man and his son through a desolate wasteland where all civilization has broken down. McCarthy’s vision is not that far off from Ruppert’s post-collapse world. This is where Ruppert loses me completely but it’s also where the film gets really good.

Chris Smith, the director of ‘The Yes Men’ and ‘American Movie’ makes a very interesting choice at this point in the picture – which up until now has mainly consisted of Errol Morris-esque use of stock footage and interview style – he allows his subject to put a pause in the film. Ruppert is having a revelation, a mighty smile crosses his face and he begins again this time with breakneck speed, explaining point by point how we can survive the coming end of (oil) days. It’s also at this point in the documentary when you realize how well Smith has presented this mad prophet – who if you gave him a trenchcoat would be a modern day Mr. Beale. This is something that Smith must be credited with, because what Ruppert has to say is important and without ‘Collapse’ it would be left to the Internet trolls, whether they be 9/11 or peak truther’s to scream in caps on YouTube pages at the bottom of this review. Chris Smith during a talk at the Angelika Theater in NYC said that this will be his last documentary, that he wanted to return to fiction film calling it much easier – let’s hope that’s not true. Collapse is a dire wake up call for the YouTube Generation, the VHS generation and the cinemascope generation – wake up or die.

FWD: FWD: FWD: Go.See@Collapsemovie.com

SUBJECT: Take your friend to this picture – you’ll need someone to talk about it with.

Zach Roberts is a journalist and film reviewer, he edited the 2008 investigative comic book “Steal Back Your Vote” with Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and is producer of several DVD’s including The Election Files and Big Easy to Big Empty. Currently he is working on a film investigating mining related pollution. Follow him on twitter at twitter.com/docutweets

To read an excerpt from Mr. Tasini’s book, The Audacity of Greed, please click here.

Zach Roberts has produced DVD’s with award-winning investigative reporter Greg Palast including Big Easy to Big Empty and Palast Investigates. Follow Zach on twitter at zdroberts and on The Public Record’s documentary review feed DocuTweets. He can be reached at zdroberts (at) gmail.com

To read an excerpt from Mr. Tasini’s book, The Audacity of Greed, please click here.

Zach Roberts has produced DVD’s with award-winning investigative reporter Greg Palast including Big Easy to Big Empty and Palast Investigates. Follow Zach on twitter at zdroberts and on The Public Record’s documentary review feed DocuTweets. He can be reached at zdroberts (at) gmail.com

Zach Roberts has produced DVD’s with award-winning investigative reporter Greg Palast including Big Easy to Big Empty and Palast Investigates. Follow Zach on twitter at zdroberts and on The Public Record’s documentary review feed DocuTweets. He can be reached at zdroberts (at) gmail.com

This is the first installment of The Public Record’s “Call to Action” documentary review series. We’ve included links at the end of the review to assist readers who would like to obtain additional information and, most importantly, become active.

The Cove

This week, the small town of Taiji, Japan will be flush with cash. The next couple of months for this coastal community will be their boon season, for this is when the dolphin drive happens.

More than 20,000 porpoises and dolphins will be herded into a lagoon in this unassuming tourist town over the next handful of months. Some will be chosen for places like Sea World and aquariums but the majority will be slaughtered. The National Parks Conservation Association estimates that the number of bottlenose dolphins (the most popular dolpin, see: Flipper) specifically around Japan are as low as 37,000.

“We tried to do the story legally” - Louie Psihoyos

Louie Psihoyos, the film’s director started out as a photographer – shooting in extreme locations around the world, from photographing portraits on the top of Egypt’s pyramid’s to the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. After spending more than a decade shooting for National Geographic magazine, Louie co-founded OPS, the Oceanic Preservation Society. Over those years he made lots of friends in Hollywood. The type of friends that would be useful when you’re making a film like ‘The Cove.’

The film crew reads more like a roster of a Hollywood action film than that of a nature documentary. This “Ocean’s 11″ crew – a joke that the director makes at the beginning of the film – includes: a former George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Sound crew member; two free-dive record holders; an avionics technician; and a treasure hunter. And of course that doesn’t include Taiji’s most hated man – Ric O’Barry. Rick carries of his shoulders the guilt of being the creator of the worlds worship of dolphins. He’s the trainer (and catcher) of the five dolphins that acted as TV’s Flipper. After Kathy, the main ‘Flipper,’ died in his arms Ric was arrested the next day for trying to free a dolphin out of a local aquarium, thus starting his career as an activist. He’s spent the past 4 decades freeing dolphins from captivity and is the Director of SaveJapanDolphins.org

This crew was tasked with filming the dolphin kill in a cove surrounded by sheer mountain walls, barbed wire and roaming guards. If any of them we’re caught, arrest would certainly follow and then deportation from Japan.

The Cove is more of an action film than a documentary – add Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Julia Roberts and you have yourself a multi-million dollar blockbuster. And a plot with the contortions of any of the Ocean’s 11 franchise. Except this is better – because it’s all true. Military grade thermal video, rocks that hide HD video cameras and under water sound for ambiance – they all build to a crescendo that any Hollywood action film could only dream of.

But this is a documentary – one that speaks to our country’s, Japan’s and the worlds obsession with sea life, sea food and the vacations that come with it. Sea World banned Ric O’Barry from the conferences that they sponsor for speaking of Taiji and what happens there.

Japan has denied the independent findings of toxic level’s of mercury in dolphins, whales and many other fish that they still claim that they are fit to eat. Years ago, you may remember the push to only eat ‘dolphin-free’ tuna – labels popped up on every can of the chicken of the sea – we all thought it was because of the cute sea mammals. While that may have been one of the reasons it was mainly because dolphins, as cute as they are, they are toxic waste dumps. Dolphin meat has been found to contain 2000 times the safe level of mercury. In Japan dolphin meat is often labeled as whale or other sea food, so there is no way for their citizens to completely avoid it.

In America it may be easy to stay away from dolphin meat but they aren’t the only seafood contaminated by our pollution, cod, tuna and swordfish are all greatly affected by mercury.

‘The Cove’ illuminates the need for our world to not only deal with this horrendous, needless slaughter but to look at the larger picture of our oceans. There are many things that we can do to slow the drastic drops in all of all sea life due to overfishing, increasing temperatures, and pollution but first people must be aware of the issue.

If I have ever seen a call to action – this film is it – thanks to it’s production company there is a direct and simple way to act – go to takepart.com/thecove for more information. We have little time left to save the oceans and its sea life and attending this movie–with friends–is crucial in order to grasp the seriousness of the issue and its impact on us.

Read more about Japan and the International Whaling Commission here.

Spread the word about this film to people Japan who can take immediate action to stop the slaughter in Taiji by clicking here.

Find out what seafood is safe to eat for your children and especially if you are pregnant by clicking here and here.

Support OPS’s efforts by clicking here.

Tell the Prime Minister of Japan to stop the slaughter by clicking here

Or mail it here:

Prime Minister of Japan

1-6-1 Nagatacho,

Chiyodaku,

Tokyo,

100-8914 Japan

Zach Roberts has produced DVD’s with award-winning investigative reporter Greg Palast including Big Easy to Big Empty and Palast Investigates, which is available as a free download this week. Follow Zach on twitter at zdroberts and on Pubrecord’s documentary review feed DocuTweets. If you have a film you can contact him zdroberts (at) gmail.com

UPDATE:

The press coverage that ‘The Cove’ has garnered for Taiji, Japan seems to have, at least temporarily stopped the dolphin slaughter.

EIN Presswire is reporting that “Ric O’Barry, the star of “The Cove,” successfully made it into Japan and to Taiji along with other Save Japan Dolphins staff and news crews from the U.S., Germany, and the U.K., and for the first time ever – three Japanese television crews.”

This is a very important first step towards the end of the killing of dolphins and whales by Japan, but the fight is no where near ended. There is no word yet is this is just a pause in the dolphin drive while the media is interested or something more permanent.

With the recent elections in the Japanese government the world has a chance to make this a prominent issue for the newly formed government. Please continue to keep the pressure on.

The Public Record will keep you updated as this story continues to develop.

In early August, Sarah Palin made a claim that ObamaCare would create ‘death panels’ – that the elderly would essentially have to make pleas for their life in front of a panel of bureaucrats. Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ McCaughey has been identified as the creator of the ‘death panel’ myth. McCaughey has done this before. She killed HillaryCare more than a decade ago.

The infamous binder

McCaughey’s goal is to frighten people away from the single payer healthcare option. The last time a Democrat was in the White House trying to pass healthcare reform she was busy inventing stories out of whole cloth about what those reforms would do. In the 90′s, she claimed that government healthcare would be mandatory and that people would be stuck in the program. It was untrue then, as it is now.

Then she claimed that their were ‘secret provisions’ in HillaryCare – now the Internet is filled with rumors of free abortions, government databases and of course death panels. There is little doubt that Obama’s people learned from HillaryCare and took as many preventative measures as they could but no amount of planning can compete with a conservative with an agenda.

McCaughey has been all over the networks news shows talking about what she, a ‘researcher’ and former Lt. Governor of New York has found deep, deep in the ObamaCare bill. Only in one interview was she really called out for the scaremonger that she is.

Edward R. Murrow would have been proud. Jon Stewart spent more than 15 minutes with McCaughey in a recent interview for Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. [The full interview can be found here and here.] To her credit, McCaughley believed she could compete intellectually with Stewart. To say she was unprepared would be an understatement. Of course, the last time she attempted this she did not have such a formidable opponent; there wasn’t a late night comedy show reporting “fake news.”

But McCaughley’s been at this game for a long time and she still has a lot of tricks up her sleeve. She knows that one thing that American’s hate more than restricted health care options and death panels is reading. When Hillary was tasked with health care reform the media and the Republicans were obsessed with the President’s bill size (pun not intended). McCaughey didn’t miss the opportunity to use that imagery again – coming onto the set with a huge binder filled with “the first half of the House Bill 3200…” adding “it’s 1018 pages all together.” Please note that HillaryCare was over 1400.

Stewart jumps right into it, asking her the ‘death panel’ question – the infamous page 432, which of course like the plans for the evacuation of New Orleans was no where to be found. Eventually she did find and read the passage from the bill that she claims will endanger senior citizens – a provision that has been endorsed by the AARP and the American College of Physicians among others – followed by Stewart looking a bit befuddled by how McCaughley could have reached that conclusion. Still, Stewart allowed McCaughley to claw her way through his light-hearted (considering her seeming lack of knowledge of the bill) questions for another 13 minutes.

McCaughey ended the interview with the introduction of yet another trick – a claim that doctors are “frightened” of this bill. She quoted an oped written by a “physician from San Francisco,” a Dr. Katherine Schlaerth, who claimed:

“These and other provisions of the health choices act frankly scare me. As a physician, I took an oath long ago to put my patient’s interests above all else, but provisions in the bill have a quality of coerciveness that make me wonder if I can fulfill my oath.”

If McCaughey had read the rest of the article and not just the “moving” part it would have shown where this doctor sits politically. Earlier in the article she selectively quoted Obama discussing choices he made with his Grandmother:

“To quote President Obama, we must correctly inform families who might otherwise approve of “additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows (are) not necessarily going to improve care. “My problem, as a physician who has practiced medicine for decades, is that I just can’t predict with certainty what is end-of-life care, nor can I determine for another individual the meaning of “quality of life.”

She left out the important part – as many right-wing commentators have as well – “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.”

The president’s grandmother was too frail to have the surgery but still this was a choice that Obama’s family had to make because she did not have living will, something that page 432 would have probably solved.

According to Schlaerth, Obama ever the PR man is also concerned about how the death panel plan will look – “The math is obvious. If you kill the disabled and give ‘quality preventive care’ to the well, your health-care statistics will look excellent.”

Schlaerth has taken McCaughley’s problems with page 432 and taken it to the next level in an interview with NCRegister.com (America’s ‘most complete’ Catholic Newsweekly) calling President Obama a fiscal conservative at the expense of the elderly’s lives – “The real reason for these draconian provisions directed against elders who are not terminal, I believe, is to save on Social Security payments as well as Medicare payments,” Schlaerth said.

Doctor Schlaerth is also frightened for her collegues – “Health-care providers, meanwhile, may be forced to give counseling directly opposed to their religious or moral beliefs.”  The oath that she is so frightened Obama won’t let her fulfill is, I guess, filled with exceptions for her – since she’s a Christian and against life saving abortions.” Sadly, as a MD her own religious convictions will be taking precedent over the 20,000 some people that die every year do having no heath insurance.

Lastly, a little information about Dr. Schlaerth. She often credits herself with being a Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. She likes to write oped columns. She’s written extensively on abortion, dogs killing children because of allergies, stem cell research among many other hot topic issues and is available for interviews through the Life Legal Defense Foundation. She accepts Cigna, HealthNet, Medicaid, WellCare, Humana, BCBS, United Health Care, Sierra, Wellpoint (also Mastercard, AMEX and Discover)

To clarify her position – she’s an associate professor emeritus – she lost her job at USC, and another one because “she is pro-life and won’t do abortions or dispense birth control pills.” She’s now a practicing physician at Loma Linda University School of Medicine, a private Christian College in Southen California. She believes that stem cell research will “cannibalize our conceptuses for spare parts… There will be precious few paralyzed young supermen opting for baby neurons so they can walk again.”

God bless those treated by Dr. Schlaerth.

Zach Roberts is a contributor to The Public Record. He has produced DVD’s with award-winning investigative reporter Greg Palast including Big Easy to Big Empty and Palast Investigates. Follow him on twitter at zdroberts and on his documentary review feed DocuTweets.