YouTube Clips Cause Stir in Croatia
Croatia’s Social Democratic Party walked out of parliament after Interior Minister Ivica Kirin levied accusations of posting clips showing him in a poor light to YouTube. It’s not exactly the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, but it’s an indication of the impact YouTube is having on politics worldwide.
The use of the Godfather theme in the above clip of Kirin is classic, and there’s definitely a soap opera element to it all. The video has over 200,000 views, and Croatia is a country of only 4.5 million. The clip, along with others, was posted by YouTube user Bijesprvi, who has a very popular Croatian-language channel.
The news made it Stateside thanks to BoingBoing reader Mrak, who’s done all of the English reporting on the subject I can find so far.
It’s an illustration of how an interesting story from a small country can break internationally thanks to online tools like video-sharing and blogs. And YouTube is clearly a cultural phenomenon over there as well — a tendency to mispronounce YouTube “JuBito” has led to something of a cottage industry in Croatia, according to Mrak.
While everyone debates the impact YouTube will have on politics in the United States, democracy lovers should take note. While it’s not clear who posted the videos, for a country ranked 53rd in press freedom by Reporters Without Borders and which is trying to join the European Union, this kind of unfettered free speech in Croatia is a great sign.
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one of our problems is that some stories simply can not break to the mainstream media and therefore the only place we have where we can fight equally with any other mainstream media empire is internet
unfortunately, clips are not translated and even if they were you could not understand what was he trying to say since it does not make any sense in Croatian either
similar story is behind government spokesperson mr. Maček who is also laying low, since we have caught him in a number of lies and we are trying to find this lies and then publish this video clips
we have also made site which is made on the model of dailykos.com (site url is http://pollitika.com) and there we encourage people of all pollitical affiliations to join, write and debate political issues, we have even a number of parliament members bloging among us
Croatia is a young democracy, and democracy is not hapeninng overnight, so video clips like this, sites like pollitika.com are quite usefull in speeding this process up. We are quite far away from some ideal society, but persons like our interior minister or government spokesperson are not going to find themselves employed after atummn election cycle.
if you need some more info, or have some questions, let me know, I will be more then happy to respond or document whatever is needed
one more clarification
when I say “we” I am thinking of croatian blogosphere and croatian internet users
I read Daily Kos daily.