Does it matter whether you take from a documentary what you are supposed to take?

This may seem like an odd question given that documentaries are supposed by default to be impartial accounts of events and situations, but I have long held the view, and I accept that this may not be the case with all documentary writers and producers, that often the maker of the documentary has a journalistic eye to a story and has already reached some conclusions about the subject matter and as a consequence whether consciously or sub-consciously the maker will produce a documentary that matches their own point of view. It is a similar issue to one seen in experimental science where an experimenter has an expectation of certain results and is more likely to see those results whether they are accurate or not. I don’t necessarily see this as a major issue, just something worth bearing in mind as you read this.

The upshot of this point is that often in a documentary there will be certain points that the viewer is supposed to take away from it, and potentially some conclusion that the viewer is supposed to draw. There was a good example of this last night on Channel 4’s documentary of Wikileaks and Julian Assange. Now, I should point out that I am aware broadly of Mr Assange, and the controversy surrounding him. I keep roughly up to date on the news and read Private Eye with whom he has had correspondence, and I am aware of Wikileaks as a phenomena and the type of material being leaked. I was interested more in my reaction to the programme since it appeared that the aim was to draw the viewer into the World of media ethics and to suggest Assange as a master manipulator who acted in his own interests at all times. This was not, however, what I took away from it.

There were several points that I felt were more powerful within the piece. The one that stood out more than anything else was that there was an apparent disconnect between the role that Assange had described for himself, and the role that he appears to have taken. He seemed to be suggesting himself as an engineer of information, gathering pieces of data from a variety of sources, cross checking facts and verifying information before presenting it to the public through both his own site and the mainstream media. What appeared to be the case was that he was indeed an engineer of sorts but perhaps more a social engineer. The implication of the documentary was that a large part of the leaked material had come from one primary source, potentially a somewhat naïve young military intelligence officer in the US military who was groomed by a hacker and intelligence operative in an online chatroom.

These documents ended up with Assange through his personal social network and he then groomed a somewhat overeager media to act on his behalf to disseminate the information. What this left me with the impression of was the intrinsic greed and gullibility of senior players in the global media, the interesting approach to ethics of the intelligence community, and the play of personal ego in dealings of this nature. I’m not actually that interested in the bulk of the Wikileaks material. I know that it has caused a stir, but to my way of thinking, if you are not already aware that in war there is going to be collateral damage, that young men and guns lead to dead civilians, that covert units exist in most modern armies, that covert units are used to “take out” key targets, that casualty figures are generally not accurate during times of war and that diplomats who tend to be in post as a consequence of nepotism rather than ability, and whose exposure to real life has been at public school and Oxbridge tend to be somewhat less than complimentary about each other and tend to indulge in the sort of name calling and general bitchiness more usually associated with “chav” girl gangs then you are probably not the sort of person to whom this information is relevant. And if you are aware of those things then the leaks will probably only have served as confirmation and are therefore largely irrelevant. Just my opinions.

So, the upshot of all this is that rather than take away the idea that Mr Assange is not a very nice man and has few in any scruples, what I took away was that in the main media people who should know better are not that savvy, that computer geeks tend to make poor activists due to a lack of ethics, and that on the whole the Wikileaks drama was just that, a drama, as in something that was carefully scripted to lead the viewer through a story more for entertainment than any genuine desire to inform. If information was the primary goal then producing something that genuinely caused national shock and consternation would probably have been a better idea. Personally I can’t wait for the UFO leaks – now those will be funny…..