Fake-history films like Vice and The Uncivil War are the new threat to truth

Fake-history films like Vice and The Uncivil War are the new threat to truth | Simon Jenkins

The biopic about Dick Cheney is part of a disturbing fashion for film-makers to play fast and loose with historical facts

Is this the death of journalism – or just of history? This week sees the screening of Vice, a biopic of George W Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney, who is presented as the evil genius behind the Iraq war, torture and other misdemeanours. Its maker, Adam McKay, makes no bones about wishing to nail the misdeeds of a man “about to sail over the horizon”. His star, Christian Bale, even “thanked Satan for giving me inspiration to play the role”.

Vice follows hard on the heels of the British dramatist James Graham’s Brexit: The Uncivil War, for Channel 4. That set out to reveal the truth about Brexit, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings, the eccentric fixer behind the Vote Leave campaign. Graham declared a desire “to make sense of how the fault lines began … to do what journalism cannot do.”

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from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2RRO7ji

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