Coming Soon To a Theater Near You: Docuganda! [1]
Submitted by Judith Siers-Poisson [2] on

Several recent and forthcoming documentaries are, according to PR professionals, "docugandas." Those noted include "An Inconvenient Truth [3]," which features Al Gore [4] warning about global warming [5], last year's "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price [6]," "Enron [7]: The Smartest Guys in the Room," and 2004's "Super Size Me [8]," as well as the upcoming film "Who Killed the Electric Car?" "We need to clarify that this new wave of ‘documentaries’ are not, in fact, documentaries,” says Christopher Ian Bennett of New School Media, a communications and public-relations firm in Vancouver. “They fail to meet the Oxford Dictionary definition, in that they editorialize, and opine far too much.” Robert Greenwald [9], director of "Wal-Mart" and 2004's "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism [10]" comes at it from a slightly different perspective. When asked whether he feels the need to present more than one side of an issue, Greenwald said, "Is it my job to tell the story that everyone is already getting over and over 24/7? I don't think so. In a democratic system you want to hear something that hasn't been told."