My Yahoo "All Stories" news feed has been dominated lately with something called "Wochit," a cloud-based video creation company based in Tel Aviv, Israel that appears to have been adopted to a large extent by the rightwing mouthpiece The Daily Caller.
As a result, Yahoo News has featured for the past few weeks a continuous litany of clickbait GOP propaganda videos, each emblazoned with "The DC" in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Many of these are narrated by the same individual, nearly all have an anti-Obama bent, and nearly all contain GOP smear attacks on those Democratic Senate and House candidates most vulnerable in the upcoming election. Each is presented as a "news feed" as if what were being narrated was actual news. And each is garnering thousands of views.
You can page through the videos using the link above. Look for the red "DC" logo in the top right corner. These videos circulate continuously and appear at regular intervals on the Yahoo main page, in effect, inviting someone to click and view them.
Wochit acts as a distributer for such "newsworthy" content to sites such as Yahoo, and apparently maintains a staff that provides technical assistance including scripts and voice-overs for such content, content gathered continuously from "trending" or "breaking" news sources and purportedly in accordance with Fair Use. According to this interview with its co-founder and CEO, Wochit produces hundreds of videos a day, covering a panoply of topics including celebrities, world events and politics.
The scripts of the reports are culled from written reports by the likes of the Associated Press, the New York Times and the Huffington Post. “The texts themselves are gathered under fair-use from public sources… All of the voice talent is provided by Wochit via in-house operations (think of a very sophisticated and privately run version of Mechanical Turk),” says CEO and co-founder Dror Ginzberg.
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“Wochit generates both general content available to any client, and white-labeled or branded video content for publishers,” explains Ginzberg. “We monitor trending topics around the world, and build large volumes of content with solid metadata taxonomy, so any customer of ours can usually find relevant and fresh content that pertains to their audience’s topics of interests.”
I'm not sure what to make of this. In some ways the concept doesn't differ from what we post as Diaries on Daily Kos, only in video format and transmitted immediately to web news sources with whom it has
"distribution partnerships,"such as Yahoo and AOL. The article linked above also states that Wochit is bankrolled by "undisclosed U.S venture capital firms and has offices in New York and Tel Aviv." The
website itself states it is backed by Redpoint Ventures, Cedar Fund, Greycroft Partners and others. While all of that is intriguing, it doesn't necessarily point to anything nefarious, but rather, the service seems to be a vehicle that can be (and apparently is) easily co-opted and utilized by a political party or one of its organs. I should note that Wochit produces videos that have nothing to do with politics and those which could be viewed as pro-Democratic Party as well.
This article was posted just last week, containing an interview with Drew Berkowitz, described as Wochit's "SVP":
First, tell us how Wochit works?
Using a combination of automation (that quickly sources licensed video and still image content from AP, Reuters, Getty and others, adds in maps, info-graphics, social media feeds and more) and human touch (the ability to upload your own assets, enable quick, creative editing, and the chance to provide human voice over); Wochit, lets any storyteller create a video in about 10-15 minutes.
What type of organizations can use your video platform?
Anyone who wants to enhance, promote or create a story with video. That can be big publishers, independent or student journalists, bloggers, brands who are engaged in content marketing — any creator.
The appearance of these GOP propaganda videos through the Wochit medium suggests a new form of political communication has arrived, one that we ought to watch very carefully. While those of us on this site know what
"The Daily Caller" is, the vast majority of people who log onto the main
Yahoo page do not. The result is that people are viewing these propaganda pieces
as actual news.
Some enterprising individual posted a video on YouTube describing the Wochit interface. It appears that these videos can be created with considerable ease. Once complete, Wochit provides the voice-over:
Using content derived from the Web to create videos is nothing new. What is different here is the distribution relationship between Wochit and major news providers such as Yahoo and AOL, and the willingness of those providers to allow streaming of this content on their "news" sites. Of course, with these companies the sole motivator is page views and eyeballs for their advertisers. But most people--particularly young people--are getting their news now solely from the web. The propriety of passing right-wing--or any other--propaganda off as "news" by behemoth-sized outlets such as Yahoo and AOL, which actively control the content we see, implicates other concerns as well --perhaps the most important being the purpose and nature of journalism itself. Unfortunately, as we know, the Republican Party has never let concerns like that get in their way, and they certainly won't start now.