Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 joins other recent films in nailing the lie that documentaries are not as ‘real’ as news
In his excellent new documentary about the 2016 US presidential election and its aftermath, Fahrenheit 11/9, Michael Moore reserves his most weary anger for what he sees as the progressive establishment – Obama, both Clintons, the Democratic party and, most sharply, a complacent left-of-centre media. The film highlights the uncomfortable relationship that documentaries have with journalism and news media, the genre often being dismissed by the media as too partial and opinionated. The Washington Post summed this up recently in an article headlined “Documentaries aren’t journalism, and there’s nothing wrong with that”, which attempted to create a firewall between documentaries and “real” reporting.
This argument is illogical – that because documentaries often have an opinion, sometimes provoke an emotional response, and want to tell powerful visual stories with some artistic licence, they don’t deserve praise for reporting accurately or reflecting usefully on current events. Fahrenheit 11/9 is a good riposte to this, skewering the idea that print journalism doesn’t also come with opinions: it particularly criticises the New York Times for belittling the democratic socialist wing of the Democrats.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PzCfkp
via
0 Comments