Needs Help: Documentary Of Lies

In Special Efforts, some have asked if this should be narrowed as the current description appears to be complaining.

For the record:

• Which thread?
• This is for "Complaining" and not "Needs help"
• The complaint was that out-of-universe examples are complaining.

found and yes, the examples are really complainy.

I think this trope needs to be cut, since the examples are complaining of all sorts. It seems like it's better to have tropes focusing on suspect techniques (Quote Mine, Manipulative Editing) or frequently misrepresented subject matter (Somewhere A Palaeontologist Is Crying). One tropeworthy one we don't have yet is when documentaries are built around staged and reenacted footage.

Should this become the Staged Footage Documentary or should it become a new trope?

With that, what's the difference between staging for deception, and staging because it was never filmed at all?

I'm not sure how salvageable this trope is. As noted, we can cover the specific tactics that are used to produce a falsified documentary without calling the entire thing a lie, which is taking sides in a very partisan matter.

Haha, wow. This is an old one. I had kind of forgotten this page exists, or at least assumed that it had been purged/cleaned up like others of its ilk.

Just nuke it. We don't do this sort of thing anymore.

I'll be sad if my trope gets cut. :(

Sooner or later it happens to everyone ... the first one is always the hardest.

Based on a Great Big Lie is similar... it includes, among other things, several books that were marketed as true stories that turned out to have been fabricated.

edited 1st Aug '12 10:38:01 PM by Ronfar

The thing is, though, "Alien Autopsy" and its ilk do seem to form a distinct genre, much like the National Enquirer and its ilk are regarded as belonging to the "genre" of "tabloid journalism", although there isn't an official name for this particular version of it.

Maybe some of the more controversial examples can be moved to a new trope? Something like "Documentary With Lies"?

Yeah, this seems to be "Lurid Tales of Doom" but rather than posing as journalism, it poses as a documentary.

Support cut just to stem complaining.

I think that the trope should probably be retained but it should be limited only to documentaries, regardless of media format, in which the producers can be shown to conclusively have falsified a major part of their work. Stuff that falls outside the bounds of opinion or speculation. Like if a 9/11 conspiracy theory group produced a video that used quote mining to make it sound like internal government documents show that the attack was known about ahead of time when the actual documents say the opposite as the central focus of the documentary would count as this trope, while a video that focused on nitpicking tiny, unimportant holes on the chain of events and attempted to draw a conclusion based on those wouldn't count.

Similarly, works of fiction that are done in a manner close enough to a documentary that they're often confused with real documentaries, like the recent Mermaids: The Body Found show on the discovery channel should probably be removed from this trope as well.

Agreed.

You know, I think we outta say In Universe Examples Only Please/No Real Life Examples Please

edited 7th Dec '12 5:07:00 AM by TropeEater

The latter there should probably go on Mockumentary. It's the trope for fictional documentaries.

edited 7th Dec '12 7:35:07 AM by shimaspawn

Clocking.

Stale and expired. Locking it up.