ARTICLE: Film fact-checking is here to stay. So let’s agree on some new rules

[Ryan Goble]

From the WaPo..,

‘Will this ever end?”

That’s President Lyndon Baines Johnson speaking to an aide early in “Selma,” Ava DuVernay’s stirring, ambitious drama about Martin Luther King Jr. and the voting rights movement of 1965.

In the movie, Johnson — weary from having passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — is talking about King’s push for a federal law protecting blacks’ right to vote. But he could just as well be talking about the controversy that has engulfed “Selma” since its release on Christmas. No sooner had critics (this one included) given the movie rapturous reviews than the fact-checkers began to descend, in a ritual as time-honored as the swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano. 

The Gotcha Game has become as reliable a feature of awards season as red-carpet gaffes and snits about snubs. But as “Selma” has been put through the wringer in the past couple of weeks, the ritual is wearing thin. What’s more, it has taken on the tiresome contours of a Manichean choice: You’re either on the side of art or on the side of truth; gauzy poetic license or cold, hard facts. If you admire “Selma,” you are perforce being unfair to Johnson’s legacy. If you think DuVernay has taken too many liberties with chronology and characterization, you play into the age-old habit of preferring your civil rights stories delivered by way of a white savior — like the heroic FBI agents in “Mississippi Burning” or plucky Emma Stone in “The Help.”

Read the full article here.