This topic is largely overlooked. Bush's White House lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction to have an excuse to invade the country. The second point was that Iraq took part in 9/11, but this point is not even mentioned here. Democrats believed him as much as Republicans. NYT and Washington Post believed the story as much as WSJ and Fox News. So I guess no media post the war really wanted to make some huge documentary project attacking this journalism and political mistake as everyone believed the Bush lie so you'd be calling yourself a liar. Hence we get these smaller homemade projects. This is a homemade documentary by a left-wing journalist critical of neo-conservatives, news media pro war, and news media not taking his side. Unfortunately homemade in 2004 meant something way different than it does now with high quality Youtube videos. You didn't have a ton of digital shots you could edit together and most people didn't know how to edit. This guy clearly struggles a lot just editing shots together and it looks amateurish. There is some stock music used to spice it up. And overall the pacing is so fast that it doesn't quite measure up to better structured docs focused on clear line by line arguments. This is a doc that throws a lot at the screen hoping that there will be some coherent message in there anyhow which is true enough, but still less entertaining or educational than more expensive docs made in studios and not by cutting a bunch of VHS tapes together.
Personally I do think the Bush deception is a huge issue. But when people who hate Bush make docs or news segments about this it's important to not go overboard. Here it feels like he's just throwing everything at Fox News and Bush no matter how small. Unfortunately it detracts from the WMD lie message. It feels more like an attack on right-wing media than about the Iraq war. It gets stuck on attacking media and right-wing media overall instead of focusing on WMDs. How did they get it wrong? What did they get wrong? This is not clearly explained here. We don't hear anything about how the WMD claims were made, who made them, or what sources they used. That's the main element at play here! Yet it's too hard to study and explore and much easier to just create some flashy editing around a bunch of media clips. It feels like a high school anti-media project. Low IQ, but of course not wrong. We are all anti-war. So should I like this doc because it attacks bad media and I dislike bad media? I'm not sure, maybe to some degree? But the message is so popular now that it deserves a better doc. One I can learn something new from. And this doc is not about WMDs which is a shame. That's the issue media really fumbled. Instead he focuses on loose media statements about the Iraq war overall.
The small clips and stories are often very confusing because the narrator/editor just puts them in without explaining them clearly or doing calm interviews in a studio with the subject seen in the clips. It's interviews on the run with lots of noise and indirect points made by people who are just talking on the fly. With the stock music, weird sound effects, and low-tier cheap graphics it becomes way harder to understand as the effects and sounds are there to spice it up not to add to our understanding. It's the difference between good vs. Flashy editing. This is flashy lazy editing with moral arguments not always rooted in facts. Which is a shame.
Personally I do think the Bush deception is a huge issue. But when people who hate Bush make docs or news segments about this it's important to not go overboard. Here it feels like he's just throwing everything at Fox News and Bush no matter how small. Unfortunately it detracts from the WMD lie message. It feels more like an attack on right-wing media than about the Iraq war. It gets stuck on attacking media and right-wing media overall instead of focusing on WMDs. How did they get it wrong? What did they get wrong? This is not clearly explained here. We don't hear anything about how the WMD claims were made, who made them, or what sources they used. That's the main element at play here! Yet it's too hard to study and explore and much easier to just create some flashy editing around a bunch of media clips. It feels like a high school anti-media project. Low IQ, but of course not wrong. We are all anti-war. So should I like this doc because it attacks bad media and I dislike bad media? I'm not sure, maybe to some degree? But the message is so popular now that it deserves a better doc. One I can learn something new from. And this doc is not about WMDs which is a shame. That's the issue media really fumbled. Instead he focuses on loose media statements about the Iraq war overall.
The small clips and stories are often very confusing because the narrator/editor just puts them in without explaining them clearly or doing calm interviews in a studio with the subject seen in the clips. It's interviews on the run with lots of noise and indirect points made by people who are just talking on the fly. With the stock music, weird sound effects, and low-tier cheap graphics it becomes way harder to understand as the effects and sounds are there to spice it up not to add to our understanding. It's the difference between good vs. Flashy editing. This is flashy lazy editing with moral arguments not always rooted in facts. Which is a shame.