Sensationalism

For those of you who unwittingly, plan to see Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story,” beware.

In an article touching on Moore’s yet-to-be-released documentary, and others, a warning is issued to those who look to documentaries for direction on such serious matters as business, politics, and even the meaning of life.

The article is based on a new report from the center for Social Media at American University, called “Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work,” a report based on information gathered from anonymous interviews with forty-five documentary filmmakers.

Some of the conclusions drawn from the report blatantly defy conventional journalistic ethics, finding that many documentarians opt to substitute accuracy with their desire to achieve social justice in their works. To do so, many documentarians admit to manipulating “individual facts, sequences, and meanings of images,” helping their viewers to recognize the documentaries “higher truths,” aka the filmmakers’ biased beliefs; one documentarian even admitted to allowing their film crew members to break the legs of rabbits in order to get better shots of animals being hunted in the wild.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that controversial filmmakers such as Moore manipulate reality to make their passions the passions of others, but it feels good (at least to those that hold steadfast in their own mindsets, in spite of the yellow journalism and exploitations that overwhelm media these days) to hear some of those that employ these tactics fess up.

Let’s take Moore, for example, whose latest work promises to be equally as manipulative and one-sided as his last- he only exploits his point of view, never showing the other side. Though he has proved to be an expert in none of the fields that he preaches about, he continues to spit, not report, his twisted version of reality to the unsuspecting masses that continue to eat it up.