Brody's Notes... Journalist Chase Whiteside Asks: Restoring Sanity?

Chase Whiteside  Photo Courtesy Of Chase Whiteside

By Brody Levesque (Washington DC) Nov 2 | When openly Gay Journalist Chase Whiteside covered the Comedy Central comedic duo Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Restore Sanity And/Or Fear rally this past Saturday on the National Mall in Washington D. C., he wasn't sure exactly what kind of folks he'd encounter and had no trouble finding extreme participants similar to those found at the Tea Party events he usually covers. Whiteside, along with his camera crew from New Left Media wandered through the attendees in the crowd to get their impressions of the event along with the reasons they attended and some commentary from them on current political affairs.

Whiteside, who is being profiled in this month's print edition of The Advocate, has become a YouTube must see. The Advocate, in an advance excerpt from its profile wrote:

One unforeseen result of the Tea Party movement is the ascension of Chase Whiteside, a 22-year-old student journalist from Ohio. Dressed in colorful shirts and ties when he’s on camera, Whiteside has become a new progressive media darling with his reports from conservative political events. His interviews at Tea Party gatherings, a Sarah Palin book signing, and Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally in Washington, D.C., have racked up over 4.9 million hits on YouTube as of mid September.

New Left Media—as Whiteside and filmmaking partner and Wright State University classmate Erick Stoll call their endeavor—began as a reaction to the fevered health care reform debate in the summer of 2009, when Fox News fed its audience talking points about death panels and a rationing of services. Covering a town-hall meeting on health care in Columbus, Whiteside and Stoll found attendees repeating the Fox News “Obamacare” positions. “It’s not like they all had the same ideas just out of the blue about the health care bill,” Whiteside says. “They were getting them from the same place. We were fascinated by this idea, the consistency of the media narratives.”

Unlike progressive talking heads, Whiteside is not doing all the pontificating in his videos, shot by Stoll. Microphone in hand, Whiteside asks attendees if they’ll answer a few questions, simply telling his would-be subjects he’s a journalist—a reporting method sometimes criticized on comment boards—and his interview subjects do all the work of hanging themselves by their own tongues.

Attendance at the Stewart/Colbert rally, according to sources within the U. S. Park Service, was unofficially estimated at well over 275,000 persons. This by far outstripping attendance at  Fox News conservative commentator Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor Rally last August, which the crowd was estimated to be at around 87,000.