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Get FISA right is delighted to announce that our new video/cable TV ad, Congratulations, President Obama. Please get FISA right, premiers January 20, Inauguration Day, in Washington DC on MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, and the Comedy Channel.
If you’d like to congratulate President Obama, please leave a message in a comment on the Get FISA Right blog — or on Facebook or on YouTube, if you prefer. If you want, you can also share your views with him and the new administration about FISA, the PATRIOT Act, and civil liberties.
Media release below the fold.
media release
For immediate release
Contact
Jon Pincus, jon { at } achangeiscoming { dot } net, 425 736-7322
Patrick Bruckart, pbruckart { at } verizon { dot } net, 804 658-8391
Brendan Biryla, brendan { at } saysme { dot } tv, 310 450 7222
Get FISA Right launches new pro-Constitution video on MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, and Comedy Channel
Washington DC — Less than a week after being voted one of the top ten "Ideas for Change in America" in change.org’s competition, the Get FISA Right activism movement is launching its new cable TV ad "Congratulations, President Obama. Please get FISA right," here on Inauguration Day.
The video, developed collaboratively with longtime partner SaysMe.tv and written collaboratively by the group’s members, features members’ photos along with headlines from the group’s meteoric rise to the #1 group on my.barackobama.com last July. A voiceover addresses the new President directly:
Even though we disagreed with your position on FISA last July, we worked for your election victory and are excited to be part of the change you’re bringing to Washington. We’re ready to help, and look forward to working with you to restore our Constitution and the rule of law. Congratulations, President Obama. Please … get FISA right.
"Rather than trying to explain all the complexities of FISA in a 25-second ad, we decided that our best bet was to try to resume our dialog with President Obama," says Get FISA Right strategist Jon Pincus. "We think Obama’s respectful response to our open letter last summer, and his hat-tip to us in his Netroots Nation video, point towards a willingness to engage. Even though there’s a lot on his plate, we hope he’ll decide to prioritize civil liberties in his first 100 days — and if he does, we want to work with him."
Written collaboratively by about 30 Get FISA Right members in December, the broadcast-quality video was produced by SaysMe.TV, who provides individuals the unique ability to get their ads on the cable networks of choice across the country. Sparked by a post from Jason Rosenbaum on The Seminal, the group easily exceeded its initial goal of raising enough to air the ad on the the three major cable news networks in DC for the inauguration. Plans are still being finalized for the next round of fundraising. For now, a post on Get FISA Right’s blog asks people to contribute via SaysMe.tv’s site and sign up for a moneybomb event on Facebook.
"The Get Fisa Right campaign is an ideal use of SaysMe’s online platform for people-powered politics. The members of Get Fisa Right immediately understood the potential to deepen citizen engagement by offering their supporters the opportunity to place their own personalized TV ads. Now citizens can take advantage of the new administration’s willingness to engage in a dialogue about how to change America," said Lisa Eisenpresser, CEO of SaysMe.TV.
Previous Get FISA Right projects with SaysMe garnered substantial media attention, including posts in Wired’s Threat Level, Ars Technica, the National Journal, Off the Bus, Third Pipe, and a coveted Slashdot link. Promotion of the latest ad will be propelled by new partnerships with change.org and MySpace Impact (a result of the group’s top-ten finish in the Ideas for Change in America competition). WIth new "pooling" functionality from SaysMe.tv that allows supporters to contribute a few dollars to help, rather than having to pay for an entire ad themselves, this campaign is on track to be even more successful.
"We’re still learning how to use video and cable TV effectively," Pincus notes. "By the time Congress starts debating the PATRIOT Act renewal and FISA reform later this year, we’ll have even more experience under our belts. We’re already working a next round of ads, setting these abstract issues in real-world terms. Stay tuned."
About Get FISA Right
Get FISA Right is a proud group of Obama supporters who believe in his call for hope and a new kind of politics. We ask President-elect Obama and Congress to reject the politics of fear on national security, and work to get FISA right. Please see the About us page on the Get FISA Right wiki, Jon Pincus’ blog post Turning the Page on FISA on change.org, and our blog at http://getfisaright.wordpress.com for recent news. Our Idea for Change in America summarizes our “asks” for the Obama administration in the first 100 days, and was delivered to Obama transition team new media director Macon Philips at the change.org event last Friday.
Links
- this media release: http://getfisaright.wordpress.com/?p=228#more-228
- Blog post with video: http://getfisaright.wordpress.com/?p=228
- Video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8c8KJVLsP4
- About Get FISA Right: http://get-fisa-right.wetpaint.com/page/About+us
- Turning the Page on FISA: http://criminaljustice.change.org/blog/view/turning_the_page_on_fisa
- more on our Idea for Change in America: http://getfisaright.wordpress.com/?p=208
2 Comments
Good luck with your videos. Naomi Wolf has found that video is the fastest way to spread a message.
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The End of America details the 10 steps that would-be dictators always take in seeking to close an open society; it argued that the Bush administration had been advancing each one. I took the message on the road, and one of those early lectures – at the University of Washington in Seattle, in October 2007 – was videoed by a member of the audience. Even with its bad lighting and funky amateur vibe, this video, posted on YouTube, has been accessed almost 1,250,000 times.
This was a humbling lesson. While a polemical argument in prose may reach tens of thousands of the usual suspects – formally educated people who like to follow such texts – the video version reached far beyond that audience. Everywhere I went, from the gas station to the nail salon, I ran into people who would have been unlikely to read a book of mine, but who were passionately supportive of the argument from having watched it on YouTube.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film…..naomi-wolf
Indeed — and there was a study from Temple University on the primaries that had preliminary data implying that changes in YouTube activity predicted future polling changes. Being able to air cable TV ads gets us out of the limited online world and into people’s living rooms.