Unfolding with the urgency and gloss of a fictional cyber thriller, director Hans Pool’s documentary “Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World” is an engaging and insightful window into the titular open-sourced investigative journalism website and its founder Eliot Higgins, made famous for their investigation into the downing of MH17. While the film is, occasionally, uncritical in regards to Bellingcat’s overall method, it is, nonetheless, a compelling documentary, and a window into the possibilities of democratized journalism.
Beginning with a TEDx presentation by Higgins, the film quickly introduces a number of journalists connected to Bellingcat and the investigations they are pursuing. The film toggles between these investigations and talking heads, including identifying white supremacists in Charlottesville, mapping locations of bombings in Syria, and the poisoning of a Russian operative in London. Circling around a few journalists who ‘volunteer’ for Bellingcat, their investigations, unsurprisingly, often lead back to Russian operatives and their attempts to obfuscate the truth. When the film does finally settle into a rhythm, and centers on the investigation of MH17, Pool’s central thesis comes to the forefront: open-sourced journalism prioritizes process and, because it’s often questioned, is more heavily researched and vetted than other institutional outlets (including CNN, BBC, NY Times, etc.).
Higgins, and by extension, Pool opt for polemic, hoping to radically shift modes of journalistic inquiry, removing the so-called gatekeepers, and focusing instead on crowd-sourced investigations. The “Bellingcat Method,” as it’s called, relies on a community of amateur investigators combing through social media accounts and other readily available data, cross-referencing photos using geo-location services, creating a tapestry of sources to figure out the operatives behind, often, global attacks. By being both open-sourced, meaning that their process, as well as the steps implemented, are available to track, and crowd-sourced, having multiple journalists working together, Bellingcat becomes replicable, adopting a scientific approach to their conclusions.
The approach, without a doubt, works. As Wilbert Paulissen, chief investigator of the Joint Investigation Team for MH17 notes, Bellingcat, by tracking the social media accounts of soldiers, essentially tied the Russian military to the attack. This combing through personal and social online archives is a sound journalist method, if, as the Higgins and others note, very time-consuming.
Pool, for the most part, lets these investigations play out, with a number of talking heads, either journalists contextualizing the information or experts, reinforcing just how experimental Bellingcat’s approach is, discussing the larger implications.
In many ways, Pool’s obvious subtitle “Truth in a Post-Truth World” tells us exactly who he aligns with. Should we expect objectivity from Pool? Not exactly, as this is a film whose argumentative thesis is built around the importance of open investigations. However, the film is so aligned with the Higgins democratization of journalism that it essentially eschews counter-arguments that question Bellingcat’s overall approach
The film hints at some of these ideological problems, as Higgins’ names a high-ranking operative in the MH17 investigation, yet it doesn’t see this type of criticism through. At one point, Paulissen mentions that he cautioned Higgins against doing such an act, but we never find out if there are repercussions. I found myself wondering, what could be the possible problems associated with open-access? Bellingcat does apply some type of editorial discretion and contextualization, unlike Wikileaks, but besides the Russian-State operated media, who openly attack Bellingcat, what could be the downfalls of complete democratization? Pool doesn’t note.
Outside of its subject. the filmmaker favors a sleek aesthetic and splits the film into discrete sections. If the film begins with an unwieldy amount of subplots, it eventually clarifies when focusing in on the MH17 investigation, though an unnecessary false cliffhanger about the fate of one of their journalists is lazy, to say the least.
Even though Pool doesn’t exactly push against his narrative subject, he does present a compelling argument for the importance of institutions such as Bellingcat. One of the most stunning scenes features a false video that gets picked up by Reuters and eventually the NY Times, and essentially doesn’t get fact-checked by any major institution because others have reported on it. This type of echo-chamber is troubling and needs to be questioned.
“Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World” is a slick documentary that presents a compelling argument about the problems presented with institutionalized journalism, yet it somewhat fails to present the full picture. Nevertheless, it’s a documentary worth seeking out, suggesting the possibility of amateur investigators with the possibility to change the course of global events. [B]