Online documentaries - Skirting Hollywood red tape and giving voice to the crackpots

The regulation free nature of the internet has allowed anyone with a theory about anything to blog about it, write angry posts on message boards, or just simply abuse a Wikipedia page, and this is partially a good thing. Gone are the days where documentary makers had to jump through hoops at publishers for their material to get any form of release to the public, and in are the days where documentary makers can serve their content straight in to the homes of their prospective viewers.

However, this free regulation has also given rise to anyone to be able to produce a documentary and have it published online for viewing, which has also increased the ability for poor quality documentaries to be published onto sites like YouTube with no fact checking occurred throughout the entire process, and let's face it: you could say President Obama is not a US citizen on YouTube and people would believe it as long as you put a sweet music track to it and some special effects. Oh wait, that's already happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDIVEfVGLBQ . That's right ladies and gentlemen, 40 odd years ago a birth certificate was faked so that a man could win a democratic election in order to enslave America into a socialist dystopia. UGH.

Seriously though, I suppose this has considerable benefits toward freedom of speech, as everybody's voice can be heard, which in modern day society can be an increasingly hard thing to acquire and see when the topic is hard politics and scandal rather than celebrity makeovers and who's sleeping with Janet Jackson. The ability to actually say what you believe needs to be said, free from the scissors of the editing room and vested interests from rich producers in Hollywood does create the ability for an unedited message to reach the viewers ears. For instance, not quite on topic with documentaries, but still relevant: the footage of Israeli commandos boarding a humanitarian aid ship yesterday was filmed and then uploaded online before the Israeli censors could have their way with it, no doubt ensuring that the world was able to watch what actually happened, rather than what a government wants us to see.

Zeitgeist is an example of a very famous online documentary, which takes a cold hard look at American politics over the past 100 years, and definitely would not have ever been supported by a Hollywood style publisher. It attacks the government for intentional loss of life, state terrorism and even suggests that the US government had a hand in the September 11th attacks. But is it fact? Without appropriate fact checking, no one knows, and this is the perfect example of why anything you read on the internet you need to find a supporting source for.