A Vlog Too Far

I was reading a little summary of the Sunday chat shows:

Gingrich, who is also considering a presidential candidacy, also had to address controversy over comments he made equating bilingual education with the “language of living in a ghetto.” “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace, after playing a YouTube video of Gingrich clarifying his comments in Spanish, chuckled and asked: “I have to say, it was interesting to watch. But in any case, why if you want people to speak English, do you put your own biography on your website in Spanish?”

Um . . . YouYube's great and all, but it seems to me that a large cable network should just be able to show video clips without the assistance of a hosting/streaming website, no? Meanwhile, my observation after trying to play with it for a few days is that one of the huge challenges to trying to do any kind of worthwhile user-generated video commentary is simply that very little video is available for download. Both YouTube and essentially all commercial outlets are stream-only. It's as if you were trying to run a blog in a world in which 85 percent of the text on the internet was somehow immune to copy-and-paste, but even worse than that because there's no video equivalent of retyping by hand. As in the example of Chris Wallace playing a snippet of the El Newt video and then talking about it, splicing video clips into commentary is the very essence of TV news. The technology to do it is out there, but the raw material kind of isn't unless you're prepared to make your own video capture set-up at home.