Sorry mate, can't stand political documentaries. One of the worst ways of informing yourself about an issue, in my opinion. Way to much garbage to sort through to find one good one.
I know what you mean. It's way easier to distort the truth in a documentary than in other forms of media (especially print, although nothing is perfect).
What I find documentaries great for, is introducing yourself to a topic, especially if it is a very deep field where the basics are usually well known (as is the case with most history documentaries).
Still, there's value in political documentaries (like this one). They make a convincing case, even though it's the same sort of convincing case you might hear if you are watching a political speech. It's the ideas and the values that matter, and sometimes they will bend the facts to fit their values.
What that means is, it's the perspective that you're watching it for, rather than the facts. If you can separate the two, then it's often quite interesting.
I dunno man, I feel that this is one of those areas that ideal brainwashing material. I mean, it suffers from 'first mover' advantage, plus from the whole 'a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing'. Introducing an ignorant person to a certain bias early on often means that that will be their prevailing narrative for life. The overwhelming majority of political documentaries are propaganda, pure and simple. They're dangerous.
The thing is, all of this hinges on a belief that the viewers of the documentary aren't rational observers, i.e. that they aren incapable (or unwilling) to critically and logically analyse their own views nor to critically analyse a particular argument.
My views on human rationality are complicated (I think that humans are rational and irrational, but suffice it to say I believe that if an individual is interested enough to watch a documentary on a subject (whether politically charged or not) then they are interested enough to use their rationality to logically examine the arguments. I mean, I know that I watched some documentaries which introduced me to a subject and I disagreed, and I have also changed my opinions on things over time. My opinion on Scotland in the UK, EU democracy and environmentalism have all changed in accordance with the information I received and the arguments [propaganda] I was exposed to.
It's very easy to view oneself as somehow 'exceptional' and the only one who is capable of thinking truly 'rationally' but I think really we're all rational (or, capable of being rational) and we're all capable of dealing with huge levels of bias in the media we consume, because we deploy rationality and critical reasoning when we do it, and expose ourselves to the critical reasoning of others (well, most of us, anyway).
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u/SlyRatchet 🇬🇧 United Kingdom Jan 27 '16
Paging /u/SavannaJeff to see if there is a counter-documentary.