Abbott Media Group Launches Funding Campaign For Abbott News Service [Stephen Abbott's blog]

NEWS RELEASE
Abbott Media Group
www.abbottmediagroup.com
Monday, September 10, 2018

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Today, Abbott Media Group is launching a campaign seeking seed funding for Abbott News Service, the next stage in the evolution of news coverage of global politics and social trends.

THE PITCH:

The Abbott News Service will finally expose Americans to unbiased coverage of international politics, elections and global social trends, using multiple online media platforms.

When fully funded and operational, The Abbott News Service (TANS) will feature original reporting and photography and concise news stories of under 250 words. We’ll seek exclusive, local reporting and interviews with influencers.

Using its website, social media platforms and a mobile app, TANS will disseminate original news content in ways that are innovative, interesting and engaging.

BACKGROUND:

The Abbott News Service is the next step in the evolution of the World Politics News blog (worldpoliticsnews.blogspot.com) which Abbott Media Group owner Stephen A. Abbott has edited nearly every day since 2012.

Our mass media is failing us. It's failing to give us the news we deserve about the political events and social trends that, in a Globally interconnected world, could soon reach our shores and drastically impact our lives – both in positive and negative ways.

We need a revolution in Mass Media to ensure that we’re aware and alert to these trends, before they reach America’s shores. The Abbott News Service is the start of this revolution.

We're building the Abbott News Service to take on Big Media and fill the huge gap they’re leaving in international news coverage. We'll bring Americans the news they’re missing, and will insist on news that's accurate, unbiased and unfiltered.

This will not be “advocacy journalism,” since it will not serve as a mask for partisanship disguised as journalism, from the Left or the Right. The only thing TANS will advocate is the expansion of Americans’ knowledge of politics and social trends around the world.

THE DRIVING FORCE:

The Abbott News Service will be overseen on a daily basis by World Politics News Editor-In-Chief and Founder Stephen A. Abbott, a veteran journalist, blogger and communications consultant from Central Florida.

TANS will seek to contract with American and native citizen journalists both overseas and in the US to report on international politics and social trends, paying them by the story. TANS will consider extending internship opportunities to qualified journalism students.

The Abbott News Service will eventually seek to license stories produced by its reporters to outside media organizations, functioning, in part, as a traditional wire service.

FUNDING:
Abbott Media Group is seeking $20,000 in initial/seed funding, using a GoFundMe account and other fundraising methods. For more information and to support the Abbott News Service, go to https://www.gofundme.com/abbott-news-service 

ABOUT:
Abbott Media Group was founded in 2008, the successor to Stephen Abbott Communications (2003-2008.) It relaunched in 2015, with a focus on online media, reputation management, social media management, and ePublishing. They can be found online at www.abbottmediagroup.com, on twitter at @abbottmedia and on facebook at facebook.com/abbottmediagroup.

Founder and owner Stephen A. Abbott graduated with a BA in Communication Arts with a concentration in Public Relations from the University of West Florida in Pensacola, Florida.

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#FirstReformed #Movie #Review: Gloomy Film With #Environmental, #Theological Subtexts [Stephen Abbott's blog]

A review of "First Reformed," by Stephen Abbott

MILD SPOILERS - BUT NOT AS MANY AS ARE IN THE TRAILER!

Director Paul Schrader (who wrote the screenplays for “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” and “Last Temptation of Christ”) writes and directs “First Reformed,” the melancholy tale of Rev. Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) who lives an almost solitary life in a dying church in upstate New York. As he deals with great personal loss, and a loss of faith, his anguish bursts forth into ever-deepening despair.

While the film is already being discussed as an Oscar contender, and it has well-known stars - Cedric “the Entertainer” as a fundamentalist megachurch minister, Amanda Seyfried (“Mamma Mia”, “Veronica Mars,” “Big Love”) and Michael Gaston (“The Mentalist,” “Mad Men”) - it looks more like the Indie film it really is, with a lot of “mood-setting” and scenes that appear ad-libbed, but sadly, probably weren’t.

The long opening foreshadows Toller’s despair, featuring credits in an old-fashioned font, a long shot of the white wood-clad “First Reformed Church,” and overcast skies filled with snow seemingly about to burst forth from the clouds.

The mood, and the script, is assisted by Schrader’s Calvinist upbringing, and as a clergyman in the Reformed church in the film, Pastor Toller would be well acquainted with the dour view of human nature I think plays a part in his unraveling.

The story opens in the church, where Hawke’s Toller is going through the motions. The nearly-dead church is a 250-year-old relic about to be “re-consecrated” in a ceremony run by the building’s owners, a large fundamentalist megachurch down the street run by Cedric (Pastor Jeffers) who has brought Toller in to manage the church after Toller, a former military chaplain, suffered a tragedy and a divorce that’s sent him on a downward spiral of despair.

Toller has begun to write a year-long diary, a “form of prayer” he narrates for us throughout the film. This helps us focus on his mindset, and Schrader was right to include it, at the risk of accusations that he is plagiarizing earlier films using the same trope, because it's effective here.

The sparsely-attended, broken down Dutch Reformed Church – owned by, and serving as an appendage of, the megachurch down the road - serves as a painful and true-to-life reminder of many mainline churches that can’t keep their doors open due to dwindling membersship.  Again, Schrader nails this, because he likely lived it, first-hand, and I believe there’s no way this portrayal is accidental.

That even Toller can no longer bring himself to pray to God, and is losing faith in his bleak theology, is painfully portrayed in every frame of the film. It’s a crisis of faith in slow motion.

Toller offers to visit the fiancé of a parishioner who’s worried about her partner’s state of mind. The woman, Mary, is pregnant by the man, Michael (thank God, the character is not named Joseph!) before they have been married, but presumably after consummation.

Mary is disturbed by Michael’s growing environmental extremism. They meet, and Michael tells Toller of his obsession with the future of the planet, which he believes is doomed due to mankind’s destruction of the environment, a view encouraged when he looks up gloomy stats on websites and is reinforced by the photos of starving polar bears on the wall. He admits coyly to pressuring Mary to have an abortion, because he fears bringing a child into such a world.

Toller unconvincingly (and we know this, because of later events) encourages Michael not to give up on humanity, though his narration betrays his inner torment.

We see that Toller is the one convinced, however – rather quickly –  to take up Michael’s cause. And, after Michael is out of the picture (I’ll hide much of what’s to come from this point on) he toys with doing so in a rather radical way.

I’ll add here that as a mainline preacher, he would likely have already shared much of Michael’s environmental worldview, though it’s portrayed here as a new revelation, with Toller poring over conspiracy theory websites and papers, featuring ever more dire discoveries.

But scary rhetoric about a bleak future can backfire badly, and the film, perhaps unintentionally, shows that fear-based, alarmists tactics can lead to paranoia and extremism, rather than hope. Clearly, not what Schrader had in mind.

If there’s a religious subtext in the film, unintentional or not, it’s that mainline Christianity has, in some cases, substituted environmental activism in place of its negative theological worldview. In a real Reformed church, Michael would have been invited by Toller to teach a class or lead a church-wide protest march. But that would likely have saved Michael, and perhaps even have helped redeem Toller – an ending too positive for this film’s protagonist, and its theme.

Instead, the film’s third act is its most bleak, and most soul-crushing. The pace noticeably quickens, as Toller’s life unravels before our eyes, and his religious doubt turns to clarity in his new mission.

A fantasy "flying" scene at this point takes all reality out of the film, however, and reminds us that, “Yes, this is an Indie film.” It's a shame Schrader did this, just because he could. It adds little, and sacrifices much.

An all-too-convenient villain appears, which gives Toller the idea to perhaps become a martyr to his new environmental cause. But at the last minute, his plan changes, and in anguish, he graphically, pathetically, wraps himself in a mere symbol of martyrdom.

The film could have ended several different ways, and the ending Schrader chose is extremely hard to watch. He would have been forgiven for ending it with a fulfilled mission for Toller, perhaps with him first calling away the person he wished to save.

Or, if he had chosen to be heavy-handed, he could have had Toller resign, and announce that he’d spend the rest of his days fighting pollution. Instead, the “Sopranos-like” ending leaves audiences adrift, though the film really may have ended 30 seconds before it actually did.

My theory is that the "cup" did not pass from him, and the very last moments are a dream sequence. You’ll see what I mean.