| With the advent of affordable video recording and playback equipment in the late 1970’s, first videotape, then CDs, and finally DVDs opened a whole new world to the treatment of social issues in a popular vein. Documentary videos became the media of choice for social issue commentary, education, and discussion. Still, social issue media was still largely in the hands of film companies, media groups, television companies, and non-profits. First, made-for-TV video productions like Roots (1977) introduced the public to this genre, but it was still movie-based in format and content. Docu-dramas also took hold. The biggest groups to capitalize on the use of video technology in its early stages were environmentalists, with the ability to carry light, portable video cameras to the wild to record pretty pictures of nature, minus mosquitos, leeches and malaria. No wonder tree-hugging environmentalism dominates social issues, even today. |
| The availability and portability of video equipment could have and should have had a greater impact on other social issues such as war, poverty, and hunger, but strict censorship of wartime journalism and media following the Vietnam war put the clamps to accurate portrayal of military conflict: the military blamed the media in large part for popularizing the anti-war movement and the loss of the Vietnam War. Ironically, the raw footage of reality in documenting poverty, hunger, social inequality didn’t play well in the homes of comfortable middle-class white society, and the visual documentation of controversial issues such as abortion, homosexuality and other gender-bending issues actually worked against them because they were visually repulsive to a broad segment of the population. |
