Guerrilla News Network.

• Author: DiNovella, Elizabeth
• Position: On the Line - Josh Shore, Stephen Marshall - Interview

Josh Shore, Stephen Marshall, Anthony Lappe, and Ian Inaba are the creative forces behind Guerrilla News Network (GNN). Started in 2000, GNN makes "music videos for people who think," says its website, www.gnn.tv. The groups films are screened nationally and internationally, at underground and major festivals. Crack the CIA, a seven-minute video about the CIA and drug dealing, won a prize at the 2002 Sundance Online Film Festival.

"We came out of MTV culture," Stephen Marshall explains. "Our news videos are driven by music and aesthetics." These high energy mini-documentariescover a range of topics, including the brutal diamond trade in Sierra Leone, the 2000 election, and the war on drugs.

The Progressive caught up with Marshall and Shore during the National Conference on Media Reform, November 7-9, in Madison, Wisconsin.

Q: How have people responded to your films?

Marshall: Instead of taking a disdainful perspective toward youth who can't seem to focus on anything for longer than five minutes, we decided to build a programming culture that was suited to those people. It wasn't hard to win favor amongst them.

But we do get criticized. Critics say that we use...