WDET News
- Text Messaging Scandal Takes Internet By Storm
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May 8, 2008General - Link to Audio
Last year…Chris Crocker posted a video on YouTube. It shows him under bed sheets…pleading with the media to leave Brittney Spears alone. It was viewed over 19 million times. What does the troubled pop star have in common with Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick? Not much…but they both inspired Victor Vulaj of Wixom… to post his own video on YouTube.
After posting it on a Tuesday….Vulaj says the reaction to his video was immediate.
“Wednesday I go into the office at work and I hear some guys talking about something at work and I said what are you guys talking about. They said some idiot posted a YouTube video and they’ve been playing it on all the radio stations and I said what was the video about and they said some idiot screaming leave Kwame alone. I said dude, I’m the idiot…that was me…I made that video.”
Vulaj’s video has been viewed over 117-thousand times. And he’s not the only one on YouTube taking on the text messaging controversy.
John…aka Kartooned…spelled with a K…has posted several animated cartoons parodying the Mayor. Pointing at large computer screen in his home office…John shows off his first creation. In the video…Kilpatrick is seen addressing the media while his text messaging device goes off. He covers it with his now ubiquitous fedora.
John ended that video with a “to be continued” graphic…unsure of what YouTuber’s would think. The response was so encouraging…he posted more. John says he likes to provide some of everything for the viewer.
“I believe they get a little comic relief and something to think about on the serious side too. They get both. They get the sugar and salt or salt and pepper or what have you…a mixture”
John is not the only one roasting Mayor Kilpatrick VIA animated short. On the editorial pages of the Free Press…readers…or rather internet surfers…can get a glimpse of Big Scheme Man…an animated caricature of Mayor Kilpatrick created by political cartoonist Mike Thompson.
Thompson says Big Scheme Man was born out of the Mayor’s rocky first term…but…
“I discontinued big scheme man when the mayor was reelected because I believed he had changed and that the character no longer fit the mayor. I believed that he had grown up and learned from his mistakes and I’m a big believer in the notion that people can and do change but then when this latest scandal broke I decided to take the big scheme man suit out of mothballs.”
Thompson has been a cartoonist for more than 18 years…having drawn at three different newspapers. He says technology is changing the way he does his job. He says online animated cartoons are the present and the future.
“For younger people a black and white line with a splash of color doesn’t cut it anymore. They’ve been raised on Pixar animation and I certainly wouldn’t compare my animations to stuff Pixar is doing but ()if your gonna communicate to young people, you’ve got to speak in their language and the language they speak is visual and its sound and color and motion and I think a black and white cartoon in a newspaper in this day in age just doesn’t cut it anymore if you’re trying to express an opinion.”
The American public has more choices than ever when it comes to how and where they get their information. Some are relying more and more on internet sites like YouTube and comedy shows such as The Daily Show…still others read any one of the thousands of blogs that fill cyberspace. But all this information comes at a cost. It’s getting harder to separate fact from fiction. Dan Gillmor is the Director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University.
“We have to be somewhat careful just as we had to be careful in the traditional media era of finding things that we have a reason to either trust or trust more than not and to know what the difference is and we have a fairly large task ahead of us…as a society…as a world…to be sure that we educate ourselves and have ways to find material that we have some reason to trust.”
YouTuber Victor Vulaj echoes that concern. He’s taken great liberties in putting together sound bites for his Kilpatrick videos.
“I’ve spliced stuff together and people think it’s real. I mean I took stuff from his state of the city address…stuff from his text messages that Huel Perkins read…spliced them together and people say oh my god…I didn’t know he said that and it’s all just fake I guess.”
Mike Thompson voices still another concern. He says the text messaging scandal has provided great material…but he says there’s a downside.
“It’s been a mixed bag because the issue itself has obviously generated a number of ideas for me but anytime you have one big story that sucks the oxygen out of the room in terms of other news stories…it becomes difficult over the long term because people aren’t really paying attention to the other things that are going on.”
Although Thomson may be somewhat ambivalent about the text messaging controversy…when asked if he would ever put Big Scheme man suit back in the closet…Thompson said simply… “that depends on the Mayor.”
I’m Noah Ovshinsky, WDET News.