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Comment by doitLP | Hacker News Reader

Not a comment on this one in particular, but I tend to stay away from documentaries. I have a friend who is a documentary editor and he can take the same footage and tell completely opposite stories with it, cutting here, leaving out something there. He’s told me that it almost doesn’t matter what you give him, he can make it look however you want.

I think people trust video more than anything but it’s important to be skeptical of the reality TV-esqe trope techniques that appear in lots of popular documentaries. They are storytelling like anything else.

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Or just watch it but don't take everything said at point value and do research afterwards. Generally every documentary has a ton of articles written on "why they were wrong" afterwards so you can get both sides of the story.

You have to start by hearing one side of the story if you want to eventually get to both side of the story :)

By that logic you shouldn't engage in conversation or consume any media whatsoever.

No, by that logic you should just be careful about what you consume, avoiding people trying to tell a story.

How would you even literally describe events on the news without telling a story?

Buddhist monks were traditionally encouraged to begin all teachings with a Pali language equivalent of Thus I have heard... https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an04/an04.183.th...

AP and Reuters routinely do that.

Really? You think these aren't "stories"?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-migran...

https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-politi...

No cherry picking whatsoever here. These are just the first links on the respective news services' "top news" pages.

“Routinely” does not mean “always”, especially as their own consumer facing news feeds are not the same as their news syndication.

You can redefine "routinely" to mean just about anything. I "routinely" get my car's oil changed about once every 6 months. All I did was go straight to their site and pick out literally the first link in a list, and 2/2 were most definitely stories.

“Yesterday, Airbnb went public at a price of $X. It has revenue of $Y. It was founded in year Z...”

Versus

“In 2008, the genius Brian Chesky woke up on a frigid San Francisco morning with a crick in his neck and looked out on the fog. He had just had a terrible experience with an evil multinational hotel chain...”

(Just a hyperbolic example, not meant to be all encompassing)

It’s less of a measurable outcome and more of a goal and methodology.

None of that is news. That's an almanac entry.

Conversations are different from documentaries in that they require two or more people, whereas documentaries is someone talking at you.

As for media, there are different mediums of media that allow for more trickery. For example, if a documentary says so-and-so did X, it would take some while after viewing the documentary to check if so-and-so really did X. You are putting faith with the people creating the documentary to tell you the truth. Whereas, good non-fiction books lay claims with sources to back the claims, so you can immediately go to the source to see if the claim is really true.

Also, video can be a very emotionally salient medium, thus may impede your more rational modes of thinking.

Note: I am not against documentaries, nor is this a take on the Khashoggi documentary.

this was the argument that Socrates, according to Plato, said that the egyptian god Thoth made against doing writing!

Interesting is that in the Phaedrus?

This isnt even true. A conversation is just two people presenting their own versions of an idea to you (like documentaries). Sure the conversation can morph the ideas you take away, but in the end if you're worried about the packaging of an idea or information literally any conversation with an "other" is subject to rhetoric like any other medium.

Sure, conversation is subject to rhetoric, but what I am saying is that you are able (insofar as you are capable) of trying to unravel the rhetoric, as the conversation involves you and another person. Thus, you have more power in conversation. Whereas, documentaries is more passive. But if you are referring to conversations that you are viewing as a passive observer, then I totally agree with you.

I can't speak for you but I think about what a documentary is showing me and consider it against what else I know, just like having a conversation with someone.

The less comically baby-with-bathwater response to the realisation that "media is not balanced truth", is to develop critical faculties for media consumption and to cross-check new information with additional evidence such as your own experience before acceptance. This is hardly a new realisation and was already explored in ancient times including by the Buddhist Kalama Sutta[0] (~450BCE) and the Chinese Mohists[1] (~400BCE), etc.

[0] https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.065.th... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesamutti_Sutta [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-logic-language/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohism

"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him." - Armand Jean du Plessis Richelieu

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