In journalism, the source is god. Good journalism — the stuff that gets closer to "real" journalism (as I brand it, at least) and away from just fly-on-the-wall meeting reporting — is built on a foundation of understanding context and research, but much faith is inevitably placed in the source. If the source says something and the author quotes it, the reader assumes (and the author hopes) this information to be fact. But, there may not be a whiz-bang team of veteran fact-checkers making sure the source isn't spouting nonsense. This unfiltered information may be true, or the only thing true about the quote may be that the source said it. The reader may forget, in many instances, what they're reading on the page is just a game of telephone.
This might only seem relevant to those brave, financially reckless souls currently pursuing a journalism degree, but it's also at the heart of one of the biggest (and mostly unnecessary) controversies about Zero Dark Thirty: Does the movie imply that without torture, U.S. soldiers and operatives would never have been able to locate and kill the most wanted man in the world?
Go ahead and Google Zero Dark Thirty if you've somehow missed the parade of congressmen and click-hungry bloggers shaking their fingers at director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Point Break) and writer Mark Boal for how inaccurate or dangerous this idea is — an idea they see as being perpetuated by ZDT. (Though, it should be noted, in the movie the useful bits of info gained from interrogations come when agents are using the carrot rather than the stick, even if they've used the stick before.) There have also been some pieces written about how, disturbing or not, this may very well be accurate — that Americans on the front lines may have committed war crimes in their quest to track down Osama bin Laden.
But the thing that both sides of this debate seem to overlook is that it doesn't matter in the case of ZDT. And not because "it's just a movie."
This might only seem relevant to those brave, financially reckless souls currently pursuing a journalism degree, but it's also at the heart of one of the biggest (and mostly unnecessary) controversies about Zero Dark Thirty: Does the movie imply that without torture, U.S. soldiers and operatives would never have been able to locate and kill the most wanted man in the world?
Go ahead and Google Zero Dark Thirty if you've somehow missed the parade of congressmen and click-hungry bloggers shaking their fingers at director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Point Break) and writer Mark Boal for how inaccurate or dangerous this idea is — an idea they see as being perpetuated by ZDT. (Though, it should be noted, in the movie the useful bits of info gained from interrogations come when agents are using the carrot rather than the stick, even if they've used the stick before.) There have also been some pieces written about how, disturbing or not, this may very well be accurate — that Americans on the front lines may have committed war crimes in their quest to track down Osama bin Laden.
But the thing that both sides of this debate seem to overlook is that it doesn't matter in the case of ZDT. And not because "it's just a movie."
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