Dear MoveOn member,
As MoveOn's Video Lab Director, I don't write you many emails; I'm busy creating videos!
But I wrote you this past weekend to ask for your help to take on Donald Trump's lies and misinformation. And after his rally in Phoenix, Arizona, last night where he exhibited unhinged behavior, spewing lie after lie—and blamed the news media for the divisions in America—it's more clear now than ever that we at Video Lab have a huge and important job to do. Which is why I'm writing you one more time.
Our democracy is in peril because:
1. Donald Trump keeps lying to the American people, while directly attacking major news outlets that report the truth.1 Last night, at his Phoenix rally, he lied again and again.2 He doubled down on his refusal to condemn white supremacy and was unwilling to admit that he had blamed the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, on "many sides" and "both sides."3 His crowd of supporters even chanted "CNN sucks."4 All this bullying may be working: CNN chose to cover his entire rally live, without real-time fact checking and commentary.5 That's especially troubling given that this was an official 2020 Trump re-election campaign rally packed with Trump's screened, hand-picked supporters.6
2. The right-wing media giant Sinclair Broadcast Group is trying to pump far-right propaganda into millions of homes, doing to local TV news what Fox has done to cable news. Sinclair is forcing their local TV stations to run over-the-top pro-Trump commentaries by Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn during their news broadcasts, and after a proposed mega-merger with Tribune Media, Sinclair would reach 72 percent of households in America.7
3. Donald Trump has launched a new project, which some reporters are calling "Trump TV."8 Trump TV is an attempt to deliver fake news and "alternative facts" directly to the American people.
In short, Trump and his surrogates are finding ways to bully and bypass the media, giving them direct access to spread lies and misinformation directly to the American people.
We have an ambitious plan to counter the right-wing media takeover by expanding MoveOn's Video Lab and getting the truth out to millions of Americans. But we need your help to pull it off!
MoveOn launched Video Lab in June 2016. Since then—in just over a year—we've had more than 300 million views on Facebook alone, with viewers having spent 139 million minutes (or a grand total of 264 years) absorbing MoveOn's fact-based stories, context, and timely information.
In this new media environment where roughly half of American adults get their news from social media, video is playing a key role in our priority campaigns.9 In the fight to stop Trumpcare—which we won(!)—we created 142 videos that were viewed 40 million times and shared over 900,000 times. Our videos also generated 37,000 calls to members of Congress.
Our plan to respond to these big new challenges is to get the truth out—tens of millions of times—by doubling down on what's worked over the past year, continuing to innovate, and growing our team. It's critical that we make big investments right now, to make sure that we're prepared to respond to an unprecedented assault on the truth going into the 2018 and 2020 election seasons.
Which is why I'm asking: Can you chip in $3 to help expand MoveOn's Video Lab team?
Yes, I'll chip in to help expand MoveOn's Video Lab team.
Here's why Video Lab works so well:
- We're fast. MoveOn's Video Lab team uses cutting-edge production techniques to create powerful, Facebook-optimized videos within the fast-paced news cycle. This ability to move from inception to posting in a few hours means that we're shaping the political conversation as news breaks, providing our audience with independent, carefully sourced, progressive content and analysis that they can share with others. Video Lab releases five to ten videos per week, with a typical viewership of 100,000 per video. At the same time, Video Lab produces signature pieces with breakout success, such as our Trump's tax returns video created in partnership with Senator Elizabeth Warren—that has received more than 37 million views to date.
- We have a huge reach. Even the best, most timely content has no impact if it doesn't reach viewers. That's why MoveOn's 1.4 million Facebook followers, 264,000 Twitter followers, 45,000 YouTube followers, 25,000 Instagram followers, and millions of members who receive videos over email are so important—along with our team's relationships with some of the internet's biggest social media publishers and networkers, who serve as crucial amplifiers for our messages, helping MoveOn's Facebook posts reach 5-10 million people in a typical week. Video Lab's compelling, shareable storytelling carries widely and quickly, reaching a broad audience at a fraction of the cost of TV ads and other forms of paid media.
- We're an independent, trusted voice. We aren't beholden to any politician, party, corporation, or foundation. We are accountable only to MoveOn members! We fight Trump's lies with the truth, and we stand for core progressive values, including economic and racial justice, healing the planet, and a democracy that belongs to the people instead of to billionaires and corporations. That spirit of independence and our core values come through in our videos.
Convinced? Good! We need your help. Can you chip in $3 to help fuel our critical Video Lab series?
It has never been harder for the American people to hear through the noise and learn the facts about what's really happening in our country. We cannot allow Trump to control the flow of information in America. We have to fight back.
Thanks for all you do.
–Anne, Elsie, Sara, Seth, and the rest of MoveOn's Video Lab team
P.S. You can check out more than 500 videos from MoveOn's Video Lab here.
Sources:
1. "At Rally, Trump blames Media for Country's Deepening Divisions," The New York Times, August 22, 2017
https://act.moveon.org/go/12924?t=5&akid=188710%2E10220574%2ExWS2iv
2. "8 things Trump got wrong at the Phoenix rally," CNN, August 23, 2017
http://act.moveon.org/go/12925?t=7&akid=188710%2E10220574%2ExWS2iv
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. "WATCH: Trump holds rally in Arizona," PBS, August 22, 2017
http://act.moveon.org/go/12926?t=9&akid=188710%2E10220574%2ExWS2iv
7. "How Trump's FCC aided Sinclair's expansion," Politico, August 6, 2017
http://act.moveon.org/go/12806?t=11&akid=188710%2E10220574%2ExWS2iv
8. "Trump TV's 'real news' sounds more like real propaganda," The Washington Post, August 7, 2017
https://act.moveon.org/go/12525?t=13&akid=188710%2E10220574%2ExWS2iv
9. "Nearly half of U.S. adults get news on Facebook, Pew says," Nieman Lab, May 26, 2016
http://act.moveon.org/go/12767?t=15&akid=188710%2E10220574%2ExWS2iv
Want to support our work? The MoveOn community will work every moment, day by day and year by year, to resist Trump's agenda, contain the damage, defeat hate with love, and begin the process of swinging the nation's pendulum back towards sanity, decency, and the kind of future that we must never give up on. And to do it we need your support, now more than ever. Will you stand with us?
Click here to chip in $3, or whatever you can afford.
No comments:
Post a Comment