Some of the films in the list are just outright activist propagada. Others might be fine - I haven't watched them all. Want to learn something? Read.
Books can easily be inaccurate and emotive, if not more so. Authors are not bound by, what you very amusingly call, "journalistic ethics" at all. Then, it seems to me that, in general, that there is something about books which makes people arrogant and judgemental. And yes, there are plenty of examples of propaganda books.
Of course I agree that there are many examples of propaganda, emotive and inaccurate books.
Journalistic ethics do exist in print media, but the point is taken that they don't apply in many situations.
I phrased that carefully. Books can sort of do those things, but it is much, much weaker. Books are generally much easier to engage on an intellectual, thoughtful level.
Documentaries scare me, and I've nearly entirely cut them out of my intellectual diet. They are way too powerful, far out of proportion to the difficulty of making them or the assurance that they are even remotely connected to the truth.
I'd love to see some sort of crowd sourced service pop up where people can contribute to a video overlay that you can watch simultaneously with documentaries that debunk or validate the presented facts visually via on screen annotations at the moment they are presented. I still wouldn't rely on documentaries for my facts but it would be great for those friends and family of mine who insist on them.
Take a look at this Feynman documentary from 1964 for a case in point: http://youtu.be/y3Vc-cL9lTM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBwepkVurCI
Reality TV is just documentary filmmaking with a rapid production schedule and without the pretense of dignity. To crib from Bobby Shaftoe, it's really documentary filmmaking, but moreso.
Edit - it also seems nearly anything that deals with mythology horribly misrepresents what the ancients actually believed and what we have discovered concerning their mythologies.
We all however know people who got through university without ever reading an inch of their set list, wrapped in a bubble of uncaring, who could do with a jolt again, a boost to remember why they want to be alive and that money is not the only reason to be alive. For these people, recommending a good documentary is your duty. It could kickstart a moral highground for a month or so in them!
Adam Curtis has produced some of the best documentaries I've ever seen.
It's like people in this thread can't appreciate art for what it is. Or that some of the topics here have been determined in absolute, and aren't open to interpretation, philosophizing or opinion.
Malcolm Gladwell? Junk. Adam Curtis? Junk. Is nothing worth reading or watching unless it's an unstylized list of facts?
I don't know about you, but all I ask from my personal entertainment are "things to think about".
History is not a restaurant where you just send the food back; it's more like doing your own cooking. And my experience with Adam Curtis' stuff is that pulling one or two conclusions out does not cause the whole to collapse in a heap. His metaphors and narratives are sound.
Yet one still wants to get some sense of what is happening in different places of the world, to people in different disciplines or cultures, and you specifically do not want to get into too much detail, because nobody simply has the mental capacity to study every discipline out there, and this is mostly a form of reasonably intelligent entertainment, at its best an inspiration to get deeper in and read books etc.