Last night, I ended flipping the TV channel over to the ARTE Channel. For those who aren't familiar with the German ARTE Channel....it's basically an "intellectual's intellectual network". The stuff that they run is documentary type stuff, cinema-type movies from around the world, and political stuff that would not be of interest to 90-percent of German society.
To be kinda honest, it's typical not on the list of generally watched German channels in most houses. If you asked a hundred Germans (working-class) about the network....probably over seventy-percent would say they watch zero hours per year. I'm in the category of about twelve hours a year, but it's mostly classic cinema movies.
So the show(s) I ended watching? Putin versus USA, Russia and the US Election. It was a two parter....approximately 52 minutes each....a documentary piece from 2017. I missed about five minutes of the first part, and flipped off about 25 minutes into the second part.
The basic story (this was an American documentary producer) here is that Hillary Clinton would have won the 2016 election, had it not been for Vladimir Putin and his vast help for Donald Trump.
Generally, I would say the team put a fair amount of work into this, interviewing at least twenty significant players in the Trump White House, some folks on the Hillary Clinton team, and a couple of political strategists.
They did lead folks through the basic introduction of the Ukraine mess and how it developed....probably missing about thirty minutes of real introduction on the EU and it's opportunity to bring Ukraine into the 'big deal'.
They did hype the whole WikiLeaks business and the various emails released. In just about every single case they mentioned....they did miss the fact that the Democratic National Committee had done a lousy job of protecting their data, and they did kinda leave out the bulk of the story over Hillary's bathroom email server. On the Hillary illness factor, it did surprise me that they gave it a good eight minutes of coverage, but it was mostly to note the over-dramatic angle of the whole story told, and never asking the magical question....what exactly was really wrong with Hillary's health?
Most Germans watching this....would have been totally in agreement and thinking the obvious that Putin is what got Trump into the White House.....nothing else could explain this logically.
The fact that the Russians paid roughly ONLY $100k for all the ads mentioned about 'fake news' on Facebook? Well....yeah, they did skip that part. The survey by the two college professors which noted by spring of 2017 that the bulk of fake news was readily forgotten within two weeks after reading? Yeah, that was skipped. The fact that a large segment never clicked on the fake news pieces via Facebook? Well, that was skipped too. At some point, I think I added up about twenty things that should have been brought up, and make for a complete story.
The problem is....the producer had this aim to only make a two-type show, and for anyone to have told the entire story....skipping the blame segment of Putin, you would have needed at least twelve hours for a decent documentary.
How many Germans watched the two-parter last night? I would take a wild guess here that fewer than 200,000 across Germany (of 82-million) probably watched the segments. Most of these folks (the intellectuals)....really need some reason to blame someone for the defeat of Hillary Clinton. The fact that roughly 42-percent of Democrats preferred Bernie Sanders? Well....yeah, it's best not to bring up the primary. The fact that the NAFTA negativity in the rust-belt is so great and Hillary's team never recognized that factor? Just another part to the bigger story.
I don't have much of a problem in that type of documentary being shown....especially on the ARTE Channel. But it's real value in terms of viewership? There were probably twenty times as many Germans watching 'Bones' and 'CSI-Vegas' as watching this Hillary documentary. And let's not even bring how many were watching The Simpsons or soccer.
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