Stream It Or Skip It: ‘After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News’ on HBO, a Documentary About the Effects of Propaganda

HBO documentary After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News arrives just as we’re all self-quarantined, socially distant, and looking for an escape from the upsetting realities of a global pandemic. So why not occupy your mind with director Andrew Rossi’s (Page One: Inside the New York Times) in-depth examination of how propaganda is eroding democracy, society and truth itself?

AFTER TRUTH: DISINFORMATION AND THE COST OF FAKE NEWS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The film opens with Jack Burkman, a political operative, conservative conspiracy theorist, lawyer, lobbyist, and all-around hoaxmeister, waxing philosophical about how there really is no such thing as truth. Why would Burkman — who’s famous for partnering with comically inept fraudster Jacob Wohl to try to smear Robert Mueller with phony sexual assault accusations — agree to participate in a documentary that will no doubt make him look like an ass and a charlatan and everything in between? Because he craves attention, of course.

Anyway. Thanks to the Mueller garbage they shoveled, Burkman and Wohl enjoy significant screen time in After Truth, which details a few different conspiracy-theory fueled stories of the endlessly exasperating Trump era. Rossi burrows into a nutty story set in Bastrop County, Texas, where residents believed an Obama-ordered military exercise was something nefarious and secretive, and may have something to do with a rumor about a series of underground tunnels connecting all the area Wal Marts. Online goofballs used the power of their stupid smartphones to exacerbate the tale, which was based on approximately zero pieces of empirical evidence, and shamelessly say they’re perfectly fine with people forming their own versions of truth and reality.

Next, Pizzagate. Rossi interviews employees, patrons and the owner of Comet Ping Pong, a pizza joint that was invaded by a man wielding an AR-15 and looking for a nonexistent pedophile ring. The story is followed by segments about: The murder of Democratic National Committee member Seth Rich. Facebook’s role in fake news, and how politicians struggle to understand the platform. How leftist operatives performed a fake news “experiment” in an attempt to get Alabama Senator Doug Jones elected over creepy guy Roy Moore. How moronic Wohl and Burkman looked during the Mueller smear campaign. And the film’s last significant segment is a bit about InfoWars guy and bloated sack of protoplasm Alex Jones, because showing his terrifying, sweaty red face is the perfect way to conclude a documentary about how deranged hogwash has rendered political discourse — and the quest for truth itself — a minefield of exploding shitbombs.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: After Truth is in the same vein as strong political docs such as Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job and No End in Sight, although it’s not as distinctive or insightful as Errol Morris’ The Fog of War or The Unknown Known.

Performance Worth Watching: CNN reporter Oliver Darcy deserves accolades for maintaining his composure while Alex Jones surrounded him with his toadies and harassed him for several minutes. “How are you doing, Alex?” Darcy says, as Jones bellows like a baboon who didn’t get his allotment of bananas.

Memorable Dialogue: Burkman deploys this whopper about using fake news to promote his agenda: “Yeah, there are terrible, negative potential consequences, but so what. That’s what I say: So what.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Just so I’m not focusing on jerks and sham artists in this review, After Truth focuses a significant amount of time on interviews with unsuspecting and undeserving victims of fake news, including Comet owner James Alefantis and Seth Rich’s brother Aaron Rich — because something has to counterbalance the ugly truths Rossi addresses here.

The director diligently interviews conservatives, liberals, experts, and journalists, and some of the commentary is surprising: A Texas gun store proprietor is a perfectly reasonable individual despite the stereotypes. A Buzzfeed reporter’s full-time beat is covering fake news (and we weep for the amount of offal he’s exposed to daily). Reporters are angry and cursing up a storm on camera because they’re fighting the good fight against people who are literally MAKING SHIT UP AND GETTING OTHERS TO BELIEVE IT. The guy who “swiftboated” John Kerry and helped lead the birther movement is briefly profiled, defying the assumption that people like him want to be seen outside their scumholes and guano-soaked caves. And the things Burkman and Wohl say while Rossi has them on microphone is shocking. They’re utterly shameless, snakes coated in layers of last year’s grease from Long John Silver’s fryers.

Those moments are highlights in a film that essentially consists of conscientious reiterations of stories many of us are already familiar with; the talking-head commentary provides reasonably fresh analysis of and context for the subject matter. Rossi hews to the usual depressing-documentary trend of not even trying to offer an answer to a serious societal problem, but infuses the film with the hope that truth and its many righteous proponents ultimately win this war. It ends on an upnote about the innate goodness of most human beings, because it has to, lest Alex Jones’ breathless objurgatory ranting haunt us for weeks. That means the movie is about two percent positive, 98 percent terrifying.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Two percent is better than zero percent.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

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