Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy!
At Variety, Ted Johnson reports that arts advocates are optimistic about NEA funding despite Trump's call for cuts.
Lynch's cautiousness stems in large part from past funding battles, in which NEA funding got swept up in high-profile controversy over individual artworks as well as the culture wars in general. In his successful campaign for the GOP takeover of the House in 1994, Newt Gingrich proposed eliminating the NEA, but it was ultimately preserved with a vastly reduced budget. What is different this time around is that even though the White House has made the NEA a target for elimination, it hasn't come with the same level of "railing against the arts," as Lynch says, versus more general calls for across-the-board budget cuts.
At The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer shares grim conclusions from the largest-ever study of fake news.
The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter's existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.
At Marketwatch, Tom Teodorczuk reports on Netflix's plan to enter the TV news business.
Netflix is expected to spend roughly $8 billion on content in 2018 to fund 700 shows and films, rising to $12.2 billion in 2020. While news magazine shows have been eclipsed by reality TV in recent years, with the news cycle becoming ever more partisan and frenzied under President Trump, the streaming service hopes they can revive the genre. "Netflix are proceeding with caution over this because they're well aware that most new current affairs shows underwhelm and are expensive," added the source. "They want to make their show economically viable without compromising the production costs and newsgathering operation."
At Filmmaker, Steve Macfarlane interviews Dieudo Hamadi, the Congolese filmmaker behind Kinshasa Makambo.
"What really interests me are little, individual, personal stories. Of course, the history and context are in the background, but my point is to tell stories of people; for me, the link with the audience is through emotion, and my purpose was to show the youth of the Congo fighting to have elections. My purpose is not pedagogical."
At PEN America, a new report investigates government controls on social media in China.
Based on extensive interviews with writers, poets, artists, activists, and others personally affected by the government’s grip on online expression, as well as interviews with anonymous employees at Chinese social media companies, Forbidden Feeds: Government Controls on Social Media in China lays bare the destructive impact of the Chinese government’s vision of "cyber sovereignty" on netizens who dare to dissent. The report also includes an Appendix that documents 80 cases of Chinese citizens warned, threatened, detained, interrogated, fined, and even imprisoned for online posts over the past six years. The wide-ranging content of these posts, which touch on everything from Tiananmen Square to issues such as land rights and local corruption, demonstrates the ruthless enforcement of information control and the heightened risks facing those who dare test ever-evolving methods and powers of censorship.
A fact is a truth, that verifiable, reliable backbone of the documentarian's work. But in an era when information is filtered through the lens of belief and agenda, truth to one group may be heresy to another. Fact-checking has never been as complex or vital, whether to provide authenticity to a report or recapture a flailing public trust. Post 9/11, the documentarian has become a pivotal witness to a world in uproar, taking on many a journalistic mantle. But according to the Center for Media and Social Impact's report Dangerous Documentaries: Reducing Risk When Telling Truth to Power, documentarians often find themselves with far fewer resources than the investigative journalist. An integrated model of fact-checking is one such resource, still in development within the documentarian's workflow.
SXSW Announces Jury and Special Awards
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East Doc Platform Awards Best Docs from Central and Eastern Europe
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SF Film Fest Announces Diverse, Female-centric Lineup
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Lisa Marie Russo to Head BFI Doc Society Fund
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Nancy Dubuc Exits A&E Networks, Joins Vice Media
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