I cringe every time I here the phrase, “I learned in a documentary…” and then someone tries to teach me something they learned in a documentary. Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE a good documentary and watch them all the time. We just watch one on North Korea the other day that turned my blood cold.

The reason I lurch when I hear someone quote a documentary is that most documentaries are propaganda based. That doesn’t mean they are inaccurate necessarily, it just means for the most part they are agenda driven. Most documentaries do have a lot of good, reliable and repeatable information in them. I just cringe when I hear people quote a documentary as social or scientific doctrine knowing they haven’t done any farther research on the topic.

For example…and Dan will roll his eyes on this one…we watched a docu a while back called “The Business of Being Born”. It presented horrific statistics on the ‘abysmal’ process of having a baby in a hospital with ‘evil’ doctor intervention. After the movie I went and looked up a majority of their stats. Most were taken out of context, needed further research, or were just plain not true. Then I found out the movie was made primarily by a group midwives and Riki Lake. This review kinda sums up what I thought about it.

The problem is I hear people quote the movie and I know they haven’t done any external research on it. And that’s the overlying problem I see with the way documentaries are digested. The material in the movies is fine, but pretty much every documentary is made by a group or person pushing a cause or trying to change the way we think, for good or for bad.

I hear people tell me that plastic water bottles are the devil because of a docu they saw. or that eating meat after 8 pm will give me colon cancer, or that every frozen turkey in the store was once a miserable and abused bird in a butcher factory. These things may be true but farther research needs to be done by the individuals who watch the movies before internalize and evangelizing the information.

Rant…over.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 7th, 2011 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.