Long after the November 2004 US presidential campaign is consigned to history (and American journalists have finished their now customary, belated apologies about how they got the coverage wrong), media heads will probably still have to note a number of novelties that grew out of it.
Among these are two new manifestations of the political impact of the internet. This was the election of the “527s” – the name for the non-party political groups that have been created to raise money and get their viewpoint out while bypassing new campaign finance laws. The most famous of these, MoveOn PAC (for “political action committee”), emerged from the online fundraising efforts of Howard Dean, an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination. Relying mainly on small donations gathered through internet campaigns, MoveOn has since raised millions to create anti-Bush ads, fund get-out-the-vote campaigns in swing states, and directly support Democratic candidates. On the other side, Swiftvets.com, the online organ of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, raises money to keep the discredited allegations about John Kerry’s record in Vietnam alive.
The second internet phenomenon is the rise of the “bloggers”, internet geeks who publish irreverent weblogs daily or weekly, often scooping the mainstream media. A number of bloggers were deemed so important that they scored invites to the two main parties’ conventions, and as a genre they have become required reading for the chattering classes, a development that has frequently translated into blog-driven content migrating into the conventional media.
But perhaps an even more interesting phenomenon has to do with a relatively “old” media form (at least by today’s short attention-span standards). This is the newfound importance of documentary films in the political and news process.
Until the 2004 campaign, most Americans had either seen very few documentaries outside the tame fare on cable (notably the History Channel and the Discovery Channel) or public television. Documentaries tended to reach the art-house cinema audience only. But the polarising effects of the current political scene, particularly lingering bitterness over the last election and the Bush administration’s decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and the continually tame responses of the US news media, have fuelled an unexpected appetite among the public for political documentaries.
Of course, most of the credit for this goes to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit: 9/11. The movie, a blistering denunciation of the Bush Administration and its destructive policies, both in the US and in the Middle East, has played to sold-out cinemas (the chains, not just the art houses), blowing away previous records for documentary ticket sales. Other documentaries, notably Control Room, about Al Jazeera, and The Corporation, about the destructive effects of unregulated corporate power, have also done well, though on nothing like the same scale.
This is mainly a phenomenon of the left. Walt Disney declined to distribute Fahrenheit: 9/11, saying it was too political. When the documentary became a hit anyway, Disney released America’s Heart and Soul, a pro-patriotism documentary instead – not political, of course – but it failed dismally at the box office.
While it is too early to gauge the true political impact of Fahrenheit 9/11, it is certainly substantial. (Among other things, Farenheit 9/11 parties have been an effective fundraising tool for – you got it, MoveOn.) On the first night of the Republican National Convention in New York, John McCain, the usually moderate US Senator, referred to a certain “disingenuous filmmaker” in his defense of the Iraq war. For a too-fleeting moment, the Republican schedule planners lost control over their tightly choreographed proceedings as the live television cameras turned to Moore, in the press gallery as a columnist for USA Today, who pumped his fists in the air and tipped his hat to McCain and the roaring delegates. As the crowd chanted “Four More Years”, Moore’s “Loser” hand gesture and raised index and middle fingers (indicating “two more months”) stole the show.
For John Nichols, Washington correspondent of leading US left liberal weekly The Nation – this represented “a rare moment in American politics”. Said Nichols: “It is not all that often that a film achieves the level of public awareness that leads a prominent politician to attack its maker in a primetime convention speech.”
MoveOn, predictably, has gotten into the game directly. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, an exposé about the Fox News Channel (the American version of Sky News) and its distorted political coverage, was sponsored by the political action campaign, which has been using it to raise funds both through parties and online DVD sales. The film has since gained the attention of mainstream distributors, opening in a number of commercial theatres in main US cities.
Why the sudden success of documentaries? For both industry watchers (with an eye on the spreadsheet) and independent filmmakers, these films illustrate how to keep production and marketing budgets down. Filmmakers can now make timely political films on short schedules and with small budgets (Outfoxed cost US$300,000). Its backers can then promote and sell the films on DVD through partnerships with grassroots political organisations. The process allows them to avoid the problems of risk-averse studios and producers, and possibly, as with Fahrenheit: 9/11, make a windfall.
But for those watching the political process and exhausted by the cheerleading or kid-glove coverage of the mainstream news outlets, it is the forthright politics to be found here that hold the appeal. Documentaries don’t have to pretend to adhere to the same rules as network or cable news. During the making of Outfoxed both CBS, one of the big three networks, and surprisingly the PBS channel did not want to sell clips to the filmmaker for fear of being seen as “too political”. The writer and Harvard English professor Louis Menand offers the following on the documentary phenomenon: “[It] shows you what you were not intended to see — and doesn’t try to speak truth to power; it tries to speak the truth of power”.
But it has not all been plain sailing. Recently, Sony backed out of a deal to distribute the DVD (where most films make their sales) of the Control Room and in September Warner Brothers decided not to distribute an anti-war documentary made by director David O. Russell to accompany the re-release of his 1999 Gulf War movie Three Kings – a studio spokeswoman was quoted as saying that it was “totally inappropriate” to do so in a political season. The documentary features interviews with Iraqi refugees and veterans of the current war in Iraq. David Russell says he will still try to distribute the documentary before the election, possibly through Moveon.org.