FIRE Begins its Career in Broadcasting

Today FIRE is excited to announce the debut of our Multimedia Project, which will use new audiovisual tools to get our message of liberty to college campuses.

As mentioned in today's press release, we are launching the Multimedia Project with a short film, FIRE on Campus, from Evan Coyne Maloney and Andrew Marcus. Maloney is the director of the feature-length movie Indoctrinate U, which has gained a lot of attention lately and highlights some of FIRE's core principles. FIRE on Campus is a really high-quality video and a look at both the workings of FIRE and, more specifically, at FIRE's case at San Francisco State University, complete with on-location footage and interviews.

One of the really interesting things about the Web video revolution is that it has opened the doors for anyone to produce a video and put it online. FIRE intends to harness this ability and desire of so many people by running a video contest for short films about issues of liberty on campus. While these may not be big-budget productions, this kind of "guerilla journalism" can have a great effect in the Internet age, especially on a student's campus—after all, how much scrutiny from a normal TV station does a college campus get? Unless it's a sports event, not much. FIRE intends to help change that by offering prizes for the best films that expose abuses or report the status of liberty on campus. Too often, universities have a hard time defending in public that which they do in private. Therefore, being able to instantly demonstrate—in a visual medium—to students, faculty, alumni, and the public that a campus is repressing speech will have a huge impact on the willingness of colleges and universities to restrict fundamental American rights.

We have big plans for FIRE Multimedia—from weekly podcasts, to web videos, to recordings of panels, speeches, etc. that FIRE personnel are a part of—so stay tuned to FIRE's Multimedia Page (due for still more improvements) to catch the latest. And if you like FIRE's move into multimedia, please feel free to donate so that we can do even more!