Calculated Truth
For me, prescience and poignancy are more valuable than urgency or agenda in any work that attempts to properly canvas our country's modern politics. It is especially enjoyable to witness how a piece like Brian Springer's 1995 Documentary Spin homogenizes a sensitivity to bias with an obvious call to action. The uncanny scrutiny provided by Springer's use of the unique informational source of unedited (or "unspun") satellite feeds from major news networks lends his content a level of validity that comes with any form of dedication to research like the kind he exhibits here.
Along with a fantastic soundscape (ripe with the creepy ambient buzzing pops and cavernous space rattle that could make any piece ominous) and a carefully narrated text that uses his title word Spin as a brilliant foundation for both a literal and subtextual discussion of media content, Springer most eloquently employs motivated edits in a way separate from how our favorite blood-boiling, polarized documentarians tend to use their censor scissors to shepherd an audience into their own opinion corral.
Unlike the favoritism and partiality (insert sigh here) that Michael Moore and Alex Jones have a penchant for, Springer strings only a subtle hint of a leftist approach in his composition. Unfortunately inherent in any filtering (or "spin") of media is an air of zeitgeist that most viewers dont appreciate. Instead, here, Springer simply rattles out a thesis that asks "what are we really missing" without asking it with a raised eyebrow.
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