The Melania Doc and Your Beat
Top Story: What the Melania doc teaches us about truthful reporting
“Figures don’t lie. But liars figure.”
Mark Twain
Headlines around the country made it clear. The Melania film was terrible. But, boy did it do well at the box office.
That bold assertion spread quickly. And You Know Who — the guy who invented MAGA, MAHA, Sleepy Joe, and an urgent build-the-wall narrative that has normalized gun-toting federal agents (in American streets) hunting people down, and sometimes killing them —was really, really happy.
Once again, the press got suckered into telling a nonsensical tall tale drummed up by the Trump camp. It compared apples to oranges and required news consumers to know a ton about the American documentary industry to debunk it.
But Reporting Right has not been fooled. And you, dear reporter, should not be fooled either.
With a little context, the idea that the Melania doc did great at the box office is pretty preposterous, which is why we always encourage you to avoid spin coming from extreme right spin doctors.
The real story?
Despite its mega-budget, the Melania Trump documentary made less than half of what the last big ticket documentary made in its first week (adjusted for inflation). And that documentary (Chimpanzee) was made for a fraction of the cost ($5 million) of the Melania documentary ($40 million.) In other words, in 2012, when Chimpanzee came out, Americans were a lot more excited to see Oscar, the friendly primate, flittering about the forest than they were this year to see The First Lady prancing around The White House in stilettos.
Consider the statement:
“The highest theater debut for a non-concert documentary in over a decade.”
Then consider these crucial facts:
Documentaries are not generally released in theaters. They usually release via streaming platforms.
The marketing budget for the Melania film was $35 million. The marketing budget for most American documentaries is rarely more than $50,000. So comparing Melania to other documentaries doesn’t even make sense. Would you compare attendance at a little league game to attendance at a MLB game? Would you compare a cupcake to a wedding cake? Would you compare a sinking sailboat to the Titanic and praise the Titanic for being so much more glamorous, when it went down? No, you would not!
It’s hard for us to understand how those facts turned into congratulatory reporting. But here we are.
Please don’t do this at home.
When sources tell you the things they are doing are the biggest, the best, the most popular, and the most profitable…make sure you know what those sources are comparing themselves to. If it doesn’t make sense to make those comparisons, don’t make them.
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Isaac Kamola, associate professor of political science at Trinity College, founder of Faculty First Responders and co-author of Free Speech and Koch Money, Manufacturing a Campus Culture War
Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe distinguished professor of history and public policy at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
Ralph Wilson, founder of the Corporate Genome Project and co-author of Free Speech and Koch Money, Manufacturing a Campus Culture War
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