Freedom of the press is threatened. Not just from authoritarian regimes, but from a worldwide belief that the mainstream media is hawking fake news. That belief is unfounded and dangerous – but I would say it, right?
Threatened (Sky Documentaries), an HBO film made by Ronan Farrow’s production company, follows a handful of journalists and photographers and documents the challenges they face. In Brazil, Patricia Campos Mello reported critically on President Jair Bolsonaro. He responded by suggesting that she offered sex to sources in exchange for negative information about him. In the eyes of millions of Brazilians, Patricia said, she’s a whore.
In Mexico, at least 120 journalists have been killed since 2000 and 90 percent of those cases remain unsolved. Sashenka Gutierrez, a photographer for a news agency in Mexico City, knew one of them personally. Her colleague was killed after she posted photos of police clashing with protesters. “It is one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist. “You are in danger the moment you walk out the door,” Guttierez said.
And then there’s the US, where we saw footage of one reporter being pepper sprayed by the police and a CNN journalist arrested during a George Floyd protest. Carl Juste said police intimidation has reached a new level. Meanwhile, mistrust in the media, fueled by Donald Trump, led directly to the 2021 storming of the Capitol.
Mixed with all this was the decline in local newspapers – 25 percent of American newspapers have closed since 2004 – and the rise of YouTube and Facebook. But this film about the importance of journalism was frustratingly light on real journalism. Why close local newspapers? Why does faith in traditional journalism leak away? What role do bad actors play? Watch The Undeclared War on Channel 4, a fictional story, and you will learn much more about troll farms and coordinated fake news campaigns than you will learn here.
We were left with a series of character studies, and no clear connection was drawn between them. A documentary dedicated to the closure of local news outlets would have been more fruitful, rather than combining it with the murder of journalists in Mexico.
And there was little point in including a British reporter from The Guardian, who walked up and down the country and looked surprised when Maga hat-wearing Trump supporters told him they did not like mainstream media, and a woman said, “I’m not going to buy. a newspaper that does not reflect my views.”