Documentaries or propaganda?

DOCUMENTARIES OR PROPAGANDA?
[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: Meghan Daum]
[Commentary] Documentaries are hot -- and cheap to make. Al Gore (and friends) accepted the Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth," which waltzed into the winner's circle as a box office phenomenon and obvious shoo-in, even though it wasn't much more than a riveting PowerPoint presentation with good lighting. Recently, there have been rumblings from the scientific community about Gore's grasp of the details. Few doubt his premise, yet scientists (on both sides of the debate) have suggested that some of his arguments -- such as suggesting a direct cause-effect between global warming and hurricanes -- were exaggerated for the purposes of getting people's attention. But who can blame him? Now that the documentary game is taking on many of the high-stakes qualities of Hollywood, it seems that only the sexiest (or most alarmist) will survive. Yet the pleasures of documentaries come from the triumph of grit and substance over flashy theatrics. And though it's naive to assume that any form of documentation other than, say, the phone book, is purely objective, the best nonfiction filmmakers have had a stake in letting their subjects speak for themselves and allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions -- even when they weren't sure what those conclusions were.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-daum19mar19,1,631...
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