THE TRUTH vs ALEX JONES

US, 2024, 120 minutes, Colour.

Directed by Dan Reed.

This is a highly significant documentary, especially in its year of release, 2024, the campaign year for the US presidential election and Donald Trump, with his history, as the Republican nominee.

Directed Dan Reed, British-born, prolific documentary producer and director, has quite a list of documentaries on contemporary issues, served as photographer for this film, sponsored by HBO, with access to court proceedings as well as documentary footage from television programs.

Audiences may remember the shooter who killed small children and teachers at the Connecticut school at Sandy Hook, 2012. It shocked America and had repercussions around the world, the deaths of small, innocent children. However, well-known conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, who had his widely-viewed television program, Infowars, very quickly announced that the episode was a hoax, the parents and others involved were just actors, moved by the government to orchestrate an episode to gun laws.

The film introduces Alex Jones early, quickly tracing his career, footage from various programs, seeing him age, hearing his emotional outbursts, his attacks against globalism, and his manufacture of various products promoting health and his advertising of these – and successful sales the more sensational his “news” items and the increasing of his viewing audience. In the contacts, his wild accusations against the parents, promotion of the hoax, seem extraordinarily callous.

The documentary also introduces the background to the children, their parents, going to school that fatal day, the outline of the events which happened, the shooter, the automatic, the children huddling in the toilet block, teachers and staff shielding them and dying, the death of the principal and the assistant…

This film is also able to show the interviews of the parents at the time of their shock, finding their children, going to the school, holding their children… And, there are interviews with the parents over the succeeding 10 years. There are also interviews with the main lawyers who took up their cause.

Over a period of 10 years after the events at Sandy Hook, several of the parents took Alex Jones to court. One of the things that Jones exploited was one of the parents, harassed by the media, deciding to go and give a statement on television, nervously smiling, then becoming very serious – Jones exploiting this nervousness as an actor being able to change his emotions on cue. The repeated play of this scene and its effect on the father is harrowing.

The latter part of the film is absorbing, the camera in the courtroom, first in Texas, the two parents, interviews with them, close-ups, their going into the stand, the techniques of the lawyer for them, the techniques of the lawyer for Jones (and out-of-court interviews with him explaining his stances), an interview with a young jock who had exploited the situation on his television program, the impressive presence of the judge and Jones’s attack on television on her.

The issue of the court was not that Jones had to be proven guilty for his broadcasts, that had been established, his having made apologies, yet going back to the same themes on his programs. Rather, there was the issue of allotment of money for the parents. This is then repeated in a Connecticut court with a large number of parents. Also in the film is Jones’s 2019 Deposition, a revelation of his character, his playing with the truth, his ambitions, sales, audiences.

Since 2016 and the presidential campaign of that year, there has been a greater focus in the US on a range of conspiracy theories, racist, complications with African-American deaths in Black Lives Matter, with theories about Hillary Clinton and child exploitation, the Alt- Right, the election of Donald Trump, his four years, is 2020 defeat, the capital demonstrations on January 6, 2021, his refusal to accept the election results, his fostering this in succeeding years and several court cases.

It is shocking to hear the parents talk about the attacks on then, random people confronting the men the streets and labelling them as actors and liars, social media postings, threats… And the amazing statistic that is produced that 24% of Americans (in fact 75 million people) still believe that the events at Sandy Hook were a hoax.

Well worth seeing, a significant contemporary challenge.