Show Producer’s Blog: Kony 2012

By ⋅ March 9, 2012 ⋅ Post a comment

What a phenomenon. Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 film went viral this week. It also generated a maelstrom of criticism. If you don’t know the story check out Jason Margolis’s piece on The World from yesterday and this NYT piece from today. For other thoughtful treatments see here, here and here.

It’s mind-blowing what this video has achieved in such a short time. I first saw it when my 22-year-old goddaughter posted it to her Facebook page. I remember thinking: I didn’t know she was interested in Joseph Kony and the LRA. I suspect she was one of those many who’d never heard of him before the video made the rounds. And yet she was hooked immediately.

I have written for years about heartbreaking issues of war and atrocity and the shortfall between international rhetoric and action. I’ve often struggled with the apparent mismatch between the horror of what’s going on and people’s blithe ignorance of it. But knowledge isn’t everything. As Samantha Power pointed out in her book, A Problem from Hell, policymakers didn’t not act in Rwanda for lack of knowing what was going on. That’s even more apparent today in Syria where slaughter is unfolding daily as the world watches on Youtube.

Furthermore, as Rebecca Hamilton argued so well in Fighting for Darfur, even when a movement mobilizes enormous political pressure and political will around something as morally urgent as apparent genocide in Darfur, it does not necessarily follow that the policy prescriptions will turn out to be the right or most effective ones.

So in this case, do the benefits of mass awareness trump the downsides of distorting the story? Or will a well-meaning but not-quite-well-enough-informed mass of people put pressure in all the wrong places, making a bad situation even worse?

As for the editors among us, the video raises difficult questions about how to best tell the stories we want to tell, how best to reach people, how much to pare down the essence of a story and still stay true to reality. Is Jason Russell off the hook precisely because he’s doing advocacy? Or does he owe us something different? Whatever you might think about his storytelling, there’s no denying he’s got millions of people hooked.


Discussion

10 comments for “Show Producer’s Blog: Kony 2012”

  • andrewtb

    Please research Invisible Children more. They have been doing this, officially, for over 7 years! Research The Global Night Commute, Displace Me and The Rescue. Also their Schools 4 Schools and TRI campaigns. The only thing being more “oversimplified” than the complexities of the violence in Uganda is how much, how long and how intensely Invisible Children has been working for the change people only started paying attention to 3 days ago.

  • mgcote

    I’ve now read twice about the “distorted story” that the video tells.  Please explain what has been distorted, overlooked or simply left out for the purposes of raising money en masse for a seemingly good cause.  thanks

  • whenyoureallyneedme

    The distortions are found in the premises. 

    The main distortion is the premise that it is efficacious to mobilize young people to encourage celebrities to petition policy makers to allocate funding to a military with a recored of human rights abuses so they might engage in a cross-border manhunt which will likely lead to more civilian deaths with no guarantee of capture so that, ultimately, a few million Americans can feel righteously empowered for a flashing moment while they continue to ignore the systematic, structural inequalities which surround them. 
    The minor distortion is the perpetuation of the premise that it is only (mostly white) Americans who can solve the problems of (most black) others. 

    This says nothing of the fact that the video misleads viewers with regards to the current situation in Northern Uganda.

    The filmmakers of Invisible Children are no doubt very talented. However, their talents lie in the slick art of the kind emotional manipulation that causes moral frenzies. Had they been lead by some one with a capacity for rigorous, nuanced evaluation, this campaign could have been truly effective. Imagine, if you will, millions of American youth speaking up against, say, black male incarceration rates, nuclear proliferation, or environmental degradation…

    On the other hand, maybe they realized that in order to drum up so many true believers you almost always need a tear-jerking creation story starring a white knight and a dark villain, and a cute kid to boot. 

    The Faustian contracts have no doubt been signed. I’m just unclear who’s holding the pen. 

  • JCRx

    Yeah, andrewtb, i *did* research them some more, and, though i had done quite a bit already, i finally found the clear offense of their campaign: and it’s so obvious, i really should have seen it sooner, so conspicuous in its absence!

    See the story in the Friday, March 9th edition of the AlterNet Newsletter [*Invisible Children "Kony 2012" Leader Suggests It's About Jesus and Evangelizing* by Bruce Wilson] at tinyurl[dot]com/7aq2vpd … This group is an agent of “stealth” evangelism!

    As a several commentors point out at the YouTube video entitled “Jason Russell and Alex Harris – Liberty University Convocation” (start at around 25:25) [and a  a truly creepy smarmy piece of video it is]: “Kony2012 is a sleazy religious crusade by Liberty University to trick people and their money to join their mindless Christian cult through emotion alone…”; “… this reeks of political propaganda … and it’s sooooo overt. His god is the true god, and he wants military intervention in Africa…”; and “Kony 2012 is a fundamentalist Christian Missionary programme. Somewhat dishonest that this wasn’t even alluded to in the documentary.”

    See also the page “We Got Trouble.” at VisibleChildren on Tumblr, and *Rosebell’s Blog* entry *Kony2012; My response to Invisible Children’s campaign*. [March 8, 2012], and others! Do your own research, people!

    While this film may or may not be a “Psyop to Encourage the Sheeple to Demand Military Invasion of Africa” because U.S. interests now want Uganda’s oil reserves [discovered in 2009!], as one quite dyspeptic young man scatologically screams in his YouTube rant {SpartanLifeCoach} … this whole thing smells fishy!

  • http://profile.yahoo.com/Q72KS7GPW34B3XU5TPAJ2TUDFM Jose Estes

    This is topic being bought out to the light and given a push to the front. You don`t have to give money just know that people are doing something ,about something, and not just standing by because it doesn`t affect thier perfect life.
    I found a little bit more info on kony @ “http://www.malldepuertorico.com/kony”

  • Piti Urca

    Let’s act like humans and stop KONY. Help us stop him, use the following link: http://on.fb.me/yFkSqy

  • AleciaM

    I work at BeadforLife, a Ugandan NGO, and I think it’s amazing that over 70 million people have seen Kony 2012. Wherever you stand on this controversy, we think people talking about the best way to stop warlords and help people affected by conflict is a good thing. BeadforLife directly serves women who have been brutalized by Kony in Northern Uganda. 
     
    For anyone who wants to DIRECTLY help women harmed by Kony, check out BeadforLife . org. We serve 5,600+ people by creating income generating opportunities, like purchasing their shea nuts. Our efforts empower them to improve their farms, address health concerns and support their families.  
     
    Support the women who were affected by Kony. Host a free and easy BeadParty to share beautiful paper beads and wonderful shea products with your friends and communities. 
     
    www . beadforlife . org /beadparty .html

  • Webface

    Regardless if you agree or not, the video is classic Hollywood.  Read more about it on our blog here http://t.co/bmmUJJGJ

  • PeaceNJustice

    83 million views, many from people who’d never heard of Joseph Kony before. The video states that Kony moved out of Uganda to DRC and CAR, with a map animation and everything, so what deception is everyone talking about? Invisible Children proposes that we influence government, but besides their “action pack”–which I highly doubt they sold that many–they don’t give a clear prescription on how to do it, which actually gives everyone freedom to do it their own grassroots way.
    The timing couldn’t have been more perfect; it was slightly before the ICC’s first ruling. The ICCs top prosecutor got significant face-time on that video worth 83 million views. I imagine there might have been -some- hope that Americans might connect the dots, and realize that the U.S. is not a part of the ICC, which in turn would lead to Americans lobbying their government to join it… like the rest of the developed world.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Joseph-Bonham/683097529 Joseph Bonham

    The criticisms against Russell and IC are nothing more than envy of successful marketing, suspicion of motive, and negativity against a clearly proposed solution. The film was not meant to be a documentary, or a news piece that considers every angle, or a self defeating unbiased overview of the situation that leaves more questions than answers. He’s not even advocating that the US gets more involved than it already is, but simply that the US stays involved. The only thing Russell and the IC are guilty of is demonstrating that the internet is the new printing press for a new age. The genre, however, is hardly new. So why all the hate now? Effectiveness.

    Good grief. The only criticisms that are valid are the ones that propose alternate courses of action and have been involved in them. Russell is not claiming to “save” or “fix” Africa, but simply that Kony must be stopped. Remind me why we shouldn’t stop Kony? Or remind me why other African problems are more important? Sure the problems are complex. Sure the solutions need to be to be developed. But why is attention a bad thing? That’s all that Russell is calling for.  

    While I’m usually intensely skeptical about everything I view or read, and while “Kony 2012″ did leave me with unanswered questions, I did not feel it was overly manipulative or untactful in any way. Having grown up around institutionalized religion I’m hypersensitive to those who play upon heart strings for money, but I’m also appreciative when someone finds and strikes a resonating chord within me. 

    The success of “Kony 2012″ is not an example of white man’s burden. It’s an example of Americans looking for meaning in their military might at a time when we are all disillusioned with the good that we might not be doing in the world. “Kony 2012″ capitalizes on the lack luster of our military.

    The role of the news community is to follow up the youtube video with the context for Africa and Kony. What are the issues? What are the proposed solutions? Whose working toward them? Whose fighting them? Why? Critiquing the quality of Russell’s video is a distraction from the issue and the critiques that do need to be levied.