political advocacy and documentaries

The New York Times’s David Carr picks up on the documentary trend that I began writing about here (in “Michael Moore, Eat Your Heart Out”) and elaborated on here (in “Of the Documentary Persuasion”).

Carr talks specifically about advocacy films (mostly liberal), whereas I also noted feature-length hagiographies (or “biopics,” to use Andrew Sullivan’s much juicier term) of Rudy Giuiliani and Cynthia McKinney and Al Gore.

Carr speculates about the reason for the trend.

But the cluster of serious, point-of-view documentaries may also represent something else, a coup d’etat on the status quo. Just as those big books of the 60’s took on the elites of the day (chemical companies, Detroit engineers) these films betray a disaffection with their postindustrial counterparts (Hollywood, the traditional news media) for filling theaters with brain-dead blockbusters and neglecting important stories.

HBO’s Sheila Nevins nails it:

“I don’t think the evening news is doing a good job of expressing the confusion about the state of the world, and this is a soapbox that a lot of people are turning to.”

Yep. Documentaries are, in part, a reflection of the failing TV news business.

(Don’t be confused by the name of my blog. That “infotainment rules” is merely an observation about the state of the news, not a hearty endorsement of the sound bite and the publicity stunt and the emotional storytelling and the slugfests and the takedowns and the tug at the heartstrings or the kick in the gut delivered by infotainment, which has all but replaced the “news” on television.

When I call for better infotainment, it’s not because I don’t like serious news. Indeed I do. I’m a geek. I think Frontline is the most valuable program on television. But I recognize that I am in a tiny minority. I know that if the mass audience liked that documentary series much as I do, TV would be wall-to-wall Frontline clones.

Television, however, delivers what sells, and what sells is entertainment—or stuff that is packaged like entertainment. Infotainment doesn’t have to be bad or stupid or crass. High-quality infotainment may in fact be superior to dry “news” as a vehicle for delivering information to audiences.

Good documentaries are, in fact, high-quality infotainment. More, please.)