"John Sweeney is famous for confronting despots, championing lost causes and traveling through the streets of Harare, Zimbabwe, in the trunk of a car. But faced with Tommy Davis of the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles, he totally lost his cool.
Today video footage of Sweeney screaming at Davis is on YouTube, taped and posted by the church.
Sweeney was "video ambushed" while on assignment for the BBC in Los Angeles to investigate the Church of Scientology and the accusations from some quarters that it is, or was, a sinister cult."
I think the role of Youtube here is important. It's being given credit as a kind of 'democratizer', of weight and import equal to a BBC documentary... as though the religion in question now has the ability to fight back by presenting its own perspective.
The reality is, I think, the online video sites will never carry the weight of broadcast television, simply because of the makeup and habits of their respective audiences. As an example, I spend many hours online everyday, and heard about this conflict on a news-rag television show.
Unfortunately, the ABC website doesn't include the youtube clips in question. The BBC Site has plenty of useful clips, but not the stuff straight from youtube.
On Youtube, you can find alot of chopped up clips and parodies, the whole thing is as muddy as Hades. What follows is the clearest re-hash of the conflict I could find. No surprise, it's a clip from the BBC news:
Here's the Panorama documentary in 4 parts:
Now, YouTube does make some contribution. It allows me to show this to you, to select what I think is interesting, etc... But so much of this story is created and framed by the television documentary makers, that even the original Youtube clip of Sweeney losing it has become part of the larger story the BBC wants to tell, and not, as the Church may have wished, the gateway to its "BBC-Panorama Exposed" website.
The Scientologists do have their own documentary on that site about how bad Panorama and Sweeney are. It's sort of interesting to watch... like watching one of those infomercials about how the FDA is keeping secret herb remedies off the market or whatever. But I can't imagine anyone is clueless enough to imagine this rejoinder will do anything but highlight precisely the kind of creepy behaviour the BBC documentary discusses.
Anyway, despite all the talk about Youtube's contribution to this conflict, I don't see it has done much to change how this will actually play out. The importance of Youtube manifests itself in quite a different way, allowing every Tom, Dick and Harry to get their own two cents in on the argument by way of video responses and replies.
A Sample:
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