Political Realities

This election year, documentaries have broken free of their film festival ghettos. Progressive documentary films like Super Size Me and The Corporation have been packing theaters all summer, and by mid-August, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 had grossed $115 million. DVDs are being screened at "house parties" organized by MoveOn.org and offered as premiums for donors to progressive media projects like Alternet and Buzzflash.

Organizations on the right have simultaneously tried to fight back, unsucessfully tarring ads for Moore's film as "electioneering" and promoting such bilious fare as Disney's America's Heart and Soul. An upcoming pro-Bush documentary, The Big Picture, wades right into the roiling controversy over who's connected to campaign communications: Director Lionel Chetwynd, a friend of Karl Rove, also is working on two films to be screened at the Republican National Convention.

Several of the recent documentary projects dissect the failure of America's mainstream media to adequately cover Bush's rush to war in Iraq. In These Times sat down to speak with two directors whose films on media and war are making an impact. Robert Greenwald is director of Outfoxed and Uncovered, both now in theaters across the country, and executive producer of two forthcoming films, Unprecented and Unconstitutional. Robert Kane Pappas wrote and directed Orwell Rolls in His Grave, which details the toll that media consolidation takes on American democracy; it opens in San Francisco and Portland this weekend.

Pappas: I enjoyed Outfoxed very much. In it, you talked about the use of language like "flip-flop," where candidates (in this case Kerry), concepts or issues are reduced to little two-word little segments. When the media reduce everything ot the shortest sound bites we could ever imagine, what is the effect on the public?

Greenwald: I think that's why we're seeing so many books become bestsellers – because they go into depth – and why, say, your films and others are really reaching a wide audience, because they crave the information to help them navigate through these times. The primary media is not doing it, because they're doing 30-second soundbites. I think they have underestimated the craving people have for substance.

Pappas: Like you, I covered lost history in my film, such as the October Surprise.When reporters go into stories like these, they're risking their career. I would like your comments about the lost history I sense now with regard to the newest enemy and the changing rationales for war. The networks are not providing context. How can we help them?

Greenwald: I think, during the buildup to war when you looked at the networks, the debate was: "Should we bomb them, or go in by land?" That was the spectrum of views we got. And any general who'd ever been in the Army was on television, when people who had dissenting opinions just could not get on.

But, again, I'm encouraged because there's so much good work going on at all levels of the media. There's Bob McChesney's work on the corporate control of media, which is structural. Then there's the alternative media: Alternet, Buzzflash, LinkTV, Air America, The Nation, In These Times... There's really a variety of those alternatives that we need to support. And then in what I call the middle ground, there are the folks monitoring the media, from FAIR to David Brock's new group, Media Matters, which is terrific.

I think that the monitoring people will play an increasingly important role because we've essentially left that ground to the right. They were, as Eric Alterman says, "working the refs" all the time. But now, with MoveOn coming into the picture, which is a critical component, I don't think the networks will be able to get away with it in the same way as when they were only worried about hearing pressure from the right. We can write letters, we can make phone calls, and, as I say all the time, liberals also buy cars and soap. It's just nuts in an evenly divided country for us not to have our voice at least equally heard.