History Main / DocumentaryOfLies

* ''Demographic Winter'' is another anti-abortion documentary that claims that Western civilization is on the verge of collapse because we're not making enough babies; some could call this ''ChildrenOfMen: the Documentary.'' The creators go for the alarmist route ''very'' quickly. When they're not bombarding the viewer with charts and headlines, whose "interpretations" tend to amount to ranting and "SEE, IT'S HAPPENING!", one is shown vanishing images of children ''every five minutes''. It doesn't help that the film is filled with hard-Religious Right propaganda (complete with some excessive emphasis on economics) where the religion aspect was ''edited out''; one of the reasons cited for the "downfall" is the fact that [[StayInTheKitchen more women are working]]. The lower-budget follow-up ''Demographic Bomb'' gets even "better", with suggestions of a Abortionist Conspiracy. It also doesn't help that Europe and Japan get the full brunt of the Demographic Winter argument (though it's somewhat justified for Japan, Europe's is much more debatable), while America gets off the hook "for now". And there's the undertone of not making the "[[UnfortunateImplications right babies...]]]"

* SyFy's ''Scariest Places on Earth'' purported to be a documentary series on haunted areas across the world, complete with eyewitnesses who tell chilling stories about their experiences in said locations. Problem? At least one of the witnesses in the episode "Greyfriars Cemetery" is credited as Awassa Tact, but [[RetroactiveRecognition who is now easily recognisable]] as AngelCoulby, an actress who went on to greater fame in various British television shows, particularly ''Series/{{Merlin}}''.

* SyFy's ''Scariest Places on Earth'' purported to be a documentary series on haunted areas across the world, complete with eyewitnesses who tell chilling stories about their experiences in said locations. Problem? At least one of the witnesses in the episode "Greyfriars Cemetery" is credited as Awassa Tact, but [[RetroactiveRecognition who is easily recognisable]] as AngelCoulby, an actress who went on to greater fame in various British television shows, including ''Series/{{Merlin}}.

* Julian Assange and other Wikileaks supporters are accusing ''We Steal Secrets'' of being one.

* Al Gore's ''AnInconvenientTruth'' is full of [[LiesDamnedLiesAndStatistics doctored statistics]] and deceptions, if not exactly out-and-out lies. One particularly deceptive set of charts [[FalseCause used to suggest causation by proving correlation]] involved putting the chart showing a rise in the average global temperature next to a chart showing the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Even assuming for the sake of argument that correlation did prove causation, the reason for the charts being placed side by side is that if they were combined, they would show that the global temperature started rising ''before'' the carbon dioxide levels did, making this a case of... ''Pre'' Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc?
** A judge in ''[[http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2007/2288.html Stuart Dimmock vs. the Secretary of State for Education and Skills]]'' ultimately ruled that the film had nine errors which had to be explained to students before it could be shown in classrooms in the U.K.

* Director [[OliverStone Oliver Stone's]] ten part series for {{Showtime}}, ''The Untold History of The United States'', has been accused of being this. Among numerous historical inaccuracies, he states that VladimirPutin is the leader of the "Soviet Union" (instead of the correct "Russian Federation") and that Kuwait was part of Iraq until 1961 (Kuwait remained a British territory after the rest of Mesopotamia/Iraq's independence in the 1930's). The rest of the documentary and the supplement book is arguably a justified critique of the US foreign policy depending on the viewer or reader, [[RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgement and that's all we'll say about that]].

* Julian Assange and other Wikileaks supports are accusing ''We Steal Secrets'' of being one.

* * Julian Assange and other Wikileaks supports are accusing ''We Steal Secrets'' of being one.

* ''I.O.U.S.A.'' is ostensibly a documentary discussing how the debt the United States owes is crippling it economically. In reality, it's a propaganda piece meant to increase support for austerity policies through deception and misstatement of the facts. One of the more egregious omissions involves when the film talks about the US having no debt at one point in history - during Andrew Jackson's presidency in the 1830's - and makes sure to avoid mentioning the fact that Jackson's time as President was marked by economic instability.[[note]] It's worth noting that the majority of US debt is not owed to China or Japan, but rather to the American People themselves - the USA finances a large chunk of its debt by borrowing against Social Security.[[/note]]

* ''The Burning Times'' is an "academic" documentary on matriarchal prehistory, goddess worship and [[BurnTheWitch witch hunts]] in the early modern period, which uncritically endorses hyperbolic and improbable neo-pagan and feminist claims (which most serious neo-pagans and feminists now admit were rubbish) about early modern witchcraft as surviving pre-Christian European paganism, body counts in the millions, and universal femaleness of victims. Notable for frequently being shown at universities and being financed by the National Film Board of Canada.

* Western Fuels Association produced a documentary called ''TheGreeningOfPlanetEarth'', touted as "A professionally produced documentary that examines the beneficial effects of carbon dioxide, including increased crop yields and vegetative growth."

* Ben Stein's ''[[Film/{{Expelled}} Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed]]'', a creationist... sorry, "[[InsistentTerminology intelligent design]]" propaganda piece that utterly ignores the readily available facts about the cases highlighted, all wrapped in an "[[HitlerAteSugar evolution leads to Nazism]]" bun. The scientists interviewed have since claimed that [[TwistingTheWords the interviews were]] {{quote mine}}d, and that they were interviewed under false pretenses.
** What's especially {{egregious}} is a lengthy quote from CharlesDarwin that seemingly supports the central premise to the documentary... the problem being that [[QuoteMine they omitted a passage]] wherein Darwin is thankful that humans are above natural inclinations, and actually care about each other as human beings, regardless of defect. This passage occurs in the middle of the quote given, so it is not as if they accidentally missed it. ''They deliberately left out contradictory evidence.''
** The central idea that the film pushes is that a "pro-evolutionary conspiracy" among scientists is suppressing the theory of intelligent design, with several interviewees claiming that they had been "blacklisted" for daring to support it. A simple Google search turned up articles that these people had authored for major publications, such as ''The Wall Street Journal'', published years after their supposed "blacklistings".
** They also lied about what the pro-ID scientists had actually done, as well. For a thorough debunking of the movie, see [[http://www.expelledexposed.com/ here]].
** While the QuoteMine of Charles Darwin was bad, at least the filmmakers had the intelligence to leave out the part that revealed the dishonest tactic. However, when Ben Stein interviewed RichardDawkins, Stein twists and quote mines Dawkins on several occasions, without even altering the footage to leave out the proper context. In ''TheGodDelusion'', Dawkins mentions the scene ending example, wherein Stein asks Dawkins for a plausible scenario about how intelligent design could be true. Dawkins mentions aliens, stating in ''The God Delusion'' that he thought he was offering an "olive branch". However, Stein then takes Dawkins hypothetical and plays it like Dawkins gave serious credulity to the idea.

** And now we have "Mermaids: The New Evidence".

** In his film ''Sicko'', Moore claims that the Canadian and Cuban single-payer healthcare systems are superior to the profit-driven US healthcare system.[[note]] World Health Organization rankings, which routinely measure a number of factors including efficiency and outcomes, DO in fact put Canada's system ''far'' ahead of America's, but actually ranks Cuba a few slots below the USA.[[/note]] He depicts the Cuban clinics as highly advanced and treating everyone in Cuba equally, but in truth those type of clinics only cater to tourists and a select few well-connected Cubans; the healthcare regular Cubans receive is much, much worse.

** In his film ''Sicko'', Moore claims that the Canadian and Cuban single-payer healthcare systems are superior to the profit-driven US healthcare system.[[note]] World Health Organization rankings, which routinely measure a number of factors including efficiency and outcomes, DO in fact put Canada's system ''far'' ahead of America's, but actually ranks Cuba a few slots below the USA.[[/note]] He depicts the Cuban clinics as highly advanced and treating everyone in Cuba equally, but in truth those type of clinics only cater to tourists and a select few well-connected Cubans; the healthcare regular Cubans receive is much, much worse. Just ask any real Cuban who defected to the US and they'll say it's one of the reasons why they left Cuba.

** ''Secrets of the Founding Fathers'' had some solid, interesting facts about the founders of the USA, but the vast majority of it was spent entertaining easily-disproved, crackpot anti-Masonic conspiracy theories. It's sadly representative of most History Channel "documentaries" lately, where they'll feature one or two respected historians and then have an equal number of known cranks for "balance".

*** Moore quotes statistics for the number of gun homicides in various countries to show the difference between countries with gun proliferation and gun control. The numbers didn't match any known independent studies. Eventually, it was revealed that he took US Government crime statistics for gun homicides, and added uses of guns for self-defense and the use of guns by police. That technically does encompass allmost all gun "homocides", but since a lot of that total were necessary uses of force to prevent more harm, it's certainly not the criminal loss of life that Moore implies. He also simply cited absolute totals rather than accounting for population differences, making the highly populated United States seem inherently violent even if its citizens didn't have access to guns.
*** The documentary featured a [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGYFRzf2Xww short cartoon]] called ''A Brief History of the USA'', which depicts a view of American history was rooted in violence and guns. It makes a number of spurious connections throughout (such as linking the founding of the Northern NRA with the resurgence of the southern KKK) and a number of rapid-fire facts apparently designed to create FalseCause in the minds of the viewers (implying that the NRA had something to do with lobbying for laws to ban blacks from owning weapons, when at the time, the NRA was still mostly a sportsman organization with few lobbying activities.)
*** ''Bowling'' also claims OsamaBinLaden had "[[SovietInvasionOfAfghanistan expert CIA training]]". Bin Laden was never trained by the CIA, and there is no evidence beyond the circumstantial, the CIA ever even dealt with him, beyond the general support granted to the ruling Mujahideen of Afghanistan in order to fight Soviet incursion.

** In his film ''Sicko'' Moore claims that the Canadian and Cuban healthcare system is superior than the US healthcare system. But real Canadians would know that its heavily bias, and even the Cuban government won't buy into his crude. He depicts the Cuban clinics highly advanced and treats everyone in Cuba with equal treatment, but in truth those clinics only cater to tourist and a select few Cubans, the healthcare regular Cubans receive is much, much worse. Just ask any real Cuban who defected to the US and they'll say its one of the reasons why they left Cuba.

* ''Demographic Winter'' is another anti-abortion documentary that claims that Western civilization is on the verge of collapse because we're not making enough babies; some could call this ''ChildrenOfMen: the Documentary.'' The creators go for the alarmist route ''very'' quickly. When they're not bombarding the viewer with charts and headlines, whose "interpretations" tend to amount to ranting and "SEE, IT'S HAPPENING!", one is shown vanishing images of children ''every five minutes''. It doesn't help that the film is filled with hard-Religious Right propaganda (complete with some excessive emphasis on economics) where the religion aspect was ''edited out;'' one of the reasons cited for the "downfall" is the fact that [[StayInTheKitchen more women are working]]. The lower-budget follow-up ''Demographic Bomb'' gets even "better," with suggestions of a Abortionist Conspiracy. It also doesn't help that Europe and Japan get the full brunt of the Demographic Winter argument (though it's somewhat justified for Japan, Europe's is much more debatable), while America gets off the leash "for now." And there's the undertone of not making the "[[UnfortunateImplications right babies]]..."

** In order to emphasize this "unprecedented" trend, the folks behind this attempt to repackage the past in a stereotypical anti-modern, pro-natalist image; an early comment amounted to a dubious anecdote about how everyone had multitudes of kids a hundred years ago. One look at European birth rates from roughly that time says otherwise (eg. France during the late 19th century had a net population growth of ''zero''). And that's not counting the attempts at tying contraceptives, the Sexual Revolution and modernity itself as ''the'' source of population decline.
** Another is the debatable and contentious use of statistics such as birth/fertility rates and replacement values. For all the supposed pretense of valuing human life, there is ironically a strong emphasis on number games, racism and sexism.
* ''Nanook of the North'', which claimed to document the lives of Inuit living in Northern Quebec, was released in 1922 and believed to be one of the first documentary films. Many of the events in the film, however, were staged; the peril in which the Inuit faced in the film was believed to be exaggerated, and the Inuit actors were encouraged to use traditional Inuit weapons rather then the guns they normally used when hunting. Though the depiction of this subject matter in film was ground-breaking at the time, and there was little precedent for the director to draw upon while making his film, as few documentaries had been made at this time.

** Russo actually did ask the commissioner of the IRS, who gave him the answer (Section 1 of the Tax Code, for those curious.) Which he then dismissed. It's also worth pointing out that at the time he made the film, his interest in the topic was less than academic, as he was in arrears on back taxes.

* Western Fuels association produced a documentary called ''TheGreeningOfPlanetEarth'', touted as "A professionally produced documentary that examines the beneficial effects of carbon dioxide, including increased crop yields and vegetative growth."

* ''I.O.U.S.A.'' is ostensibly a documentary discussing how the debt the United States owes is crippling it economically. In reality, it's a propaganda piece meant to increase support for austerity policies, through deception and misstatement of the facts. One of the more egregious omissions involves when the film talks about the US having no debt at one point in history, during Andrew Jackson's term as President - and makes sure to avoid mentioning that Jackson's Presidency was marked by economic instability.
* While used often to promote healthy eating habits, ''SuperSizeMe'' was later criticized heavily for it's blatant AuthorTract, leaving out major details that conflict with the facts they presented and not publishing a detailed diet record of the famous "30 Days of Only [=McDonalds=] Food" experiment. Simply stated, the claim was that the director was eating 5,000 calories a day (when even "super-sized" the math doesn't add up according to the parameters of the experiment) and others point out that 5,000 calories of anything would make an Olympic Runner gain weight.

** While the QuoteMine of Charles Darwin was bad, at least the film makers had the intelligence to leave out the part that revealed the dishonest tactic. However, when Ben Stein interviewed RichardDawkins, Stein twists and quote mines Dawkins on several occassions, without even altering the footage to leave out the proper context. In TheGodDelusion, Dawkins mentions the scene ending example, wherein Stein asks Dawkins for a plausible scenario about how intelligent design could be true. Dawkins mentions aliens, stating in The God Delusion that he thought he was offering an "olive branch". However, Stein then takes Dawkins hypothetical and plays it like Dawkins gave serious credulity to the idea.

** Lots of shows that try to answer the question of [[WhoShotJFK who]] ''[[WhoShotJFK really]]'' [[WhoShotJFK shot]] JohnFKennedy, or the ''real'' identity of JackTheRipper, almost always coming to a different conclusion than the ones they made before.
** ''Secrets of the Founding Fathers'' had some solid, interesting facts about the founders of the US, but the vast majority of it was spent entertaining easily disproved, crackpot anti-Masonic conspiracy theories. It's sadly representative of most History Channel "documentaries" lately, where they'll feature one or two respected historians and then have an equal number of known cranks for "balance."

*** The bigger problem is the number of unscientific investigations used, such as giving polygraph tests to witnesses. Even overlooking the unreliability of polygraphs, an eyewitness account is still relatively worthless; "not lying" doesn't mean the same thing as "not wrong". And in one or two investigations this was the majority of their inquiry.

* A documentary, ''ThePyramidCode'', makes all sorts of outrageous and wacky claims such as that the pyramids were giant night-lights, that King Tutankhamun was murdered because the greedy polytheist priests didn't like the "superior" religion his parents had introduced to Egypt and that Tutankhamun continued (King Tutankhamun died of natural causes, and rejected the religion his parents tried to impose on Egypt), and the only reason Egyptologists don't date the kingdom all the way back to back before the end of the ice age is because each and every sample they've ever carbon dated was contaminated. It also claims that the yuga cycle and the Mayan 26,000 year cycle are the same thing. Aside from the fact that the Mayans had no concept of a 26,000 year cycle, a yuga cycle is 4,320,000 years long.

** There are a whole slew of these on the same network, truTV (a more ironic name for a station there has yet been) that are extremely similar. ''Hard Core Pawn'', ''Southern Fried Stings'', ''Lizard Lick Towing'', ''Bear Swamp Recovery'', ''South Beach Tow'' etc. ''Southern Fried Stings'' deserves particular mention. It too consists of "re-enacted" cases of a "private investigator". The "cases" involve things that fall far outside of the purview of private investigators such as vehicle chases and drug busts.

* ''Bible Code Foretold 9/11'' proved to be embarassing for the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), which used to air it annually as part of its 9/11 anniversary programming. The film posited that the "Bible Code" -- a pseudo-scientific method used by Bible prophecy scholars to decipher supposed prophecies hidden in the Scripture -- predicted 9/11, as well as the RFK assassination, the Clinton impeachment, and the election of George W. Bush. As the film was made shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom, the film also predicted that Saddam Hussein would be linked to 9/11 and would die from terminal disease. TBN continued airing the film even after the Saddam-9/11 link was disproven and the dictator was hanged. TBN does not air it anymore.
* Director [[OliverStone Oliver Stone's]] ten part series for {{Showtime}}, ''The Untold History of The United States'', has been accused of being this. Among numerous historical inaccuracies, he states that VladimirPutin is the leader of the SovietUnion and that Kuwait was part of Iraq until 1961. The rest of the documentary and the supplement book is arguably a justified critique of the US foreign policy depending on the viewer or reader, [[RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgement and that's all we'll say about that.]]

* In March 2012, ''ThisAmericanLife'', one of the most popular shows on Creator/{{NPR}}, spent an episode retracting, denouncing and dissecting a prior episode, which was based on monologuist Mike Daisey's ''The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs'', about [[NightmarishFactory alleged working conditions]] at Apple production plants in UsefulNotes/{{China}}. Large portions of Daisey's monologue was shown, with very little effort, to have been fictionalized and fabricated.
** Specifically, Daisey's monologue was a combination of his own experiences (with significant exaggerations), research from other sources and stories he'd heard from others. While most of the conditions he described occurred in at least some factories, the claim that he'd personally witnessed it all was a lie that he maintained until evidence forced him to admit it.

* Director [[OliverStone Oliver Stone's]] ten part series for {{Showtime}}, ''The Untold History of The United States'', has been accused of being this. Among numerous historical inaccuracies, he states that VladimirPutin is the leader of the SovietUnion and that Kuwait was part of Iraq until 1961.

*** Moore quotes statistics for the number of gun homicides in various countries to show the difference between countries with gun proliferation and gun control. The numbers didn't match any known independent studies. Eventually, it was revealed that he took US Government crime statistics for gun homicides, and added uses of guns for self-defense and the use of guns by police. He also simply cited absolute totals rather than accounting for population differences, making the highly populated United States seem inherently violent even if its citizens didn't have access to guns.

* MichaelMoore's documentaries are often accused of this [[DontShootTheMessage even by those who generally agree with his broader points]], and he's been found to have falsified or doctored events and shots in order to make his point.
** Take the incident in ''Film/BowlingForColumbine'' where he walks into a bank, opens an account, and walks out with a rifle, for example. What the documentary doesn't show you is how the bank ''actually'' does it: it gives you a certificate that you take to a gun store down the street, which does the standard, mandatory background checks and the waiting period. Moore staged the shot to make it seem as if none of this happened.
** He was similarly ripped by the Canadian authors of ''[[http://www.amazon.ca/Rebel-Sell-Culture-Cant-Jammed/dp/0006394914 The Rebel Sell]]'' for failing to mention that all those guys he visited in the Ontario shooting range ''aren't actually allowed to take those weapons around with them'' when they leave. As one of his arguments is "gun control is not the answer, because look at Canada and all their guns but less violence!", in order to argue that a wholesale cultural shift is required to solve problems of violence (the falsity of such arguments in counterculture being the central premise of ''The Rebel Sell''), this omission was very self-serving.
** He has also been accused of {{quote min|e}}ing interviews and [[ManipulativeEditing deceptively editing]] StockFootage. In ''Columbine'', he strung together snippets from several of Charlton Heston's speeches to make them sound like one speech. Also in the film, he implied that the NRA deliberately scheduled its annual conference that year in UsefulNotes/{{Denver}} to exploit the UsefulNotes/{{Columbine}} shootings, when the truth of the matter is the conference had been scheduled months or years in advance, and the NRA ''cut back'' the conference in response to the shooting, so that only those portions of it that they were obligated to perform by federal law took place. Moore also accused Heston of holding an NRA rally right after a shooting in Flint; however, the footage he used was of Heston visiting the city almost a year later for a campaign event.
** Moore quotes statistics for the number of gun homicides in various countries to show the difference between countries with gun proliferation and gun control. The numbers didn't match any known independent studies. Eventually, it was revealed that he took US Government crime statistics for gun homicides, and added uses of guns for self-defense and the use of guns by police. He also simply cited absolute totals rather than accounting for population differences, making the highly populated United States seem inherently violent even if its citizens didn't have access to guns.
** ''Bowling for Columbine'' featured a [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGYFRzf2Xww short cartoon]] called ''A Brief History of the USA'', which depicts a view of American history was rooted in violence and guns. It makes a number of spurious connections throughout (such as linking the founding of the Northern NRA with the resurgence of the southern KKK) and a number of rapid-fire facts apparently designed to create FalseCause in the minds of the viewers (implying that the NRA had something to do with lobbying for laws to ban blacks from owning weapons, when at the time, the NRA was still mostly a sportsman organization with few lobbying activities.)
** ''Bowling'' also claims OsamaBinLaden had "[[SovietInvasionOfAfghanistan expert CIA training]]". Bin Laden was never trained by the CIA, and there is no evidence beyond the circumstantial, the CIA ever even dealt with him, beyond the general support granted to the ruling Mujahideen of Afghanistan in order to fight Soviet incursion.
** In ''Fahrenheit 9/11'', he approached several Congresspeople coming out of the Capitol and confronted them about a draft for children of those who voted for the war. Rep. Mark Kennedy of Minnesota gives him a confused look and then the camera cuts away to a Moore voiceover saying that no one wanted to send their own children. However, the cut came just before Rep. Kennedy noted that his nephew was serving in Afghanistan.
** Also in ''Fahrenheit 9/11'', he claims that the US gave a quarter billion dollars to the Taliban regime in the two years before 9/11. In actuality, this was money given to the United Nations, who spent it on famine relief and landmine clearance as part of general programs in these areas.

** What's especially {{egregious}} is a lengthy quote from CharlesDarwin that seemingly supports the central premise to the documentary... the problem being that [[QuoteMine they omitted a passage]] wherein Darwin is thankful that humans are above natural inclinations, and actually care about each other as human beings, regardless of defect. This passage occurs in the middle of the quote given, so it is not as if they DanBrowned. ''They deliberately left out contradictory evidence.''

* ''Series/WhyWeFight'': despite being a wartime propaganda piece, the films mostly avoid this. They're ''biased'', yet more-or-less true.

** When one of his films was up for a "Best Documentary" award, some commentators suggested there should be two categories - one for his films, and one for documentaries that didn't employ such filmaking and editing techniques as these

* ''WhatTheBleepDoWeKnow'': The constant [[ArtisticLicensePhysics misrepresentation of the laws of physics]] (''especially'' [[QuantumMechanicsCanDoAnything quantum physics]]) is ''unbearable''. Not surprising, since the whole thing was produced as [[http://www.rickross.com/groups/ramtha.html a giant promo for J.Z. Knight's Ramtha cult]]. Additionally, the film selectively edited an interview with Columbia University physics professor David Albert in order to make it appear that Albert endorsed its claims, when he had actually spent four hours explaining why they were wrong.

* ''Thrive'' is a film that apparently tries to [[FollowTheLeader be the next Zeitgeist]], integrating New Age thought and a slew of various conspiracies ranging from UFO secrets to the New World Order. Like ''Zeitgeist'' however, the quality and worth of the documentary is what one would expect.