Ethics in Documentary Film Production: Asserting and Changing Norms

can filmmakers finally establish norms for ethical behavior in US documentary production? Two kinds of efforts to establish stronger ethics norms in the United States have emerged since 2014: inside media companies and within independent documentary filmmaking organizations. Both of these efforts have engaged the field productively, although the evolving conversation toward norms setting has only begun and is threatened by a range of forces. This multifaceted, contradictory phenomenon illuminates the complex politics of changing ethical norms in US documentary film.Ethics in documentary filmmaking in the United States has historically been more of a hallway conversation than a convention. Although documentary filmmakers in the United States have not established shared ethical expectations, some have worked within the journalistic standards and practices of broadcast organizations such as NBC, CBS, and PBS. Visual anthropologists and other academics also have established expectations (Gross et al.; MacDougall and Taylor; Winston), without those expectations feeding back into field practice. Similarly, consultants and advisors have published ethical guides, which have not been incorporated into industry norms (Danto et al.).Ethics standards in documentary matter in the same way they matter for journalism and scholarship: documentary makes a claim to authentic communication about reality. Work done by documentary filmmakers affects what people assume is real. What people think is real affects how they participate in their society.Codes of ethics and standards and practices codes are a routine avenue for norms-setting in professions. They are typically a mark of professionalization, field definition, and legitimation. Like credentialing standards, they result from a process of setting the parameters of a particular field. In this regard, they are yet another demonstration of the principles articulated in the lifework of political economist Elinor Ostrom, who showed the power of people in groups to develop effective shared standards to manage shared challenges (Tarko). Norms-setting, once in place, creates the tools to exercise and develop the norms asserted, as they become part of practice. While they are typically voluntary, normative codes can have field-changing effects on both individuals and organizations. For instance, journalistic codes of ethics articulated both by professional societies and by media companies have altered the field (Wilkins and Brennen). Documentarians' fair use best practices codes have changed broadcaster standards, insurance practices, and the kinds of films documentary filmmakers make (Aufderheide and Jaszi).Historically, documentary filmmaking has actively avoided ethical standards, even while its practitioners have made grand claims about its power to persuade and its work as a force for good. British documentarian and institution-builder John Grierson established a durable tradition by straddling the line strategically between art and information, to win government contracts for propaganda films (Aitken). Moreover, filmmakers have had economic incentives to duck on ethical standards. Throughout the twentieth century, it was a relatively small field, and one that was unlikely to provide a viable income. It is still typically executed by small, family-held companies and by individuals, who often make a living working on industrials and commercials (Borum Chattoo and Harder). They are small actors working with big companies to make and distribute their work. Filmmakers thus have not had incentives to set standards that could potentially make it harder to get work, make work more inconvenient, or create expectations that might cost more than funders are willing to pay.At the same time, research has demonstrated filmmakers' profound and agitated concern about the ethical challenges they face in daily practice, especially in the field of cable documentary programming (Aufderheide, "Perceived Ethical Conflicts"). Other research has shown the sensitivity of participants to ethical issues in the way they are treated during filming (Sanders). Still, leading members of the independent documentary film community have resisted even the challenge of sharing thoughts about ethics in public on film festival panels, much less undertaking a norms-resetting process.To shed light on practitioners' challenges and concerns, this article describes the assertion of new norms in ethics for documentary filmmaking in the United States between 2014 and 2022. It is executed within the theoretical framework of cultural studies, in particular the work of analyzing cultural production both as subject to wider sociopolitical-economic forces and as part of the process of reshaping culture. Cultural studies scholars recognize communication actions as the pivotal point for any social change, given that shared "maps of meaning," in the words of Stuart Hall, both constrain and liberate the imagination and channel power (Hall et al.). Cultural production studies look at the forces shaping expression, whether social, political, or economic (Bourdieu). In this article, I look at industry practices, political context, economic incentives, and social movements to explain the rise of different proposals to change ethics norms in US documentary filmmaking and to assess their future.The absence of articulated ethical norms becomes ever more important, as the production of documentary does. Documentary film has never been more important in the media diet of Americans. Documentary production has grown dramatically in the last three decades, as production fueled by Discovery, National Geographic, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, and niche content providers shows us. Market data from Nash Information Services demonstrates documentary's rapid growth at the box office in recent years ("Box Office History"). The number of annual documentary theatrical releases has more than tripled since 2000. Nonfiction programming on TV has experienced a similar upward trend. Likewise, nonfiction programming is an increasingly important content category on streaming platforms. A fifth of Netflix and a full third of Disney+ offerings are documentaries. Netflix's Tiger King (2020) was one of the most watched streaming video-on-demand original series of 2020, outpacing The Mandalorian (2020) on Disney+ ("Tops of 2020"). The documentary genre, up 120 percent from 2019 to 2020, was the fastest-growing genre on streaming in 2020 (Fischer). It continues to grow; a Parrot Analytics report estimated growth of streaming documentaries as up 77 percent between 2019 and 2022 (Galuppo and Kilkenny).Viewers place enormous trust in documentaries, at a time of plummeting confidence in mainstream media and as traditional journalistic outlets, especially local journalism, have declined (Abernathy). As a 2020 Pew Research Center study reveals, nearly half (44 percent) of Americans surveyed believe that news organizations publish deliberately misleading information, and 38 percent say they are not confident in the factual accuracy of the news. More than half (55 percent) of those surveyed also expressed a desire for greater transparency about whether the news stories they consume are based on fact or opinion (Gottfried et al.). More than half (52 percent) of Americans express confidence in the veracity of scientific information in documentary films and nonfiction TV programs. That percentage drops to 28 percent when the source of information is a news outlet (Funk et al.). A 2021 American Press Institute study hints at why this skew might happen. It finds that people respond to framing that reflects moral values, including fairness, caring, loyalty, heroism, and loyalty, and that common journalistic assumptions about the integrity and the public mission of journalism are not necessarily widely shared by the public ("Do Americans Share").Documentary is a form distinguished specifically by its claim to tell a meaning-making story in good faith, about something that really happened. The trust people place in it is grounded in its claim to authenticity. The line between that claim and fiction has become less clear in some cases. While documentary has long used reenactment, for instance, it has become far more common to incorporate both scenes reenacting an episode (for instance, in Coup 53 2019 and Client 9 2010) and actors simulating a real-life role (Operation Varsity Blues 2021). Entire films have been composed using fictional aesthetics—for instance, Silenced (2014), using a black-and-white film noir approach for extended reenactment segments, and 1971 (2014), using a sepia tone and blurring imagery to hint that reenactment is actually recovered videotape footage (Hornaday). While some filmmakers, including the previously referenced films, make their choices explicit within the film, others simply do not. For instance, Mighty Times: The Children's March (2004) famously faked actuality footage from a 1963 civil rights march. The use of reenactment entered new territory when artificial intelligence was used to mimic the voice of Anthony Bourdain in Roadrunner (2021), without revealing the manipulation.Meanwhile, fast-paced entertainment production has seized on both the lower-cost production realities of documentary and the growing popularity of the form, to exploit the form's claims to truth for sensationalism. As documentary channel ratings increased in the early 2000s, the History Channel began to fill up with UFO stories, Court TV expanded its crime coverage, and Discovery and National Geographic channels both packed every moment of their top-rated series with suspense. They borrowed from the look of documentary cinéma vérité and its claims to unfiltered reality, exploiting it for sensationalism (Ouellette). Reality television, a hybrid of documentary, fiction, and game shows, surpassed sitcoms, dramas, and sports in popularity for the first time in the 2002–03 television season, according to audience data published by Nielsen ("10 Years"), and has continued to capture large audiences in recent years. Streamers have fomented binge-watching by encouraging production of documentary miniseries (Morfoot). True crime is a top-rated genre in streamed miniseries, which typically recapitulate and even glorify the legitimacy of policing and criminal justice systems that reinforce injustice and inequality (Rangan and Story). Programs such as Serial, which arguably contributed to the accused's release, are anomalies in the true crime genre.As documentary has grown, production practices have evolved to keep pace, and in some troubling ways. By the 1990s, cable TV had developed factory-like production systems both in-house and in production companies that served them, matching their branded looks and styles. These made-for-hire works fed into what became known variously as the nonfiction, factual, and unscripted market (Aufderheide, "Mainstream Documentary Film"). As reality television became its own category, documentary filmmakers often got their first work, and learned production practices, on reality shows. Filmmakers reported being told what to tell people in their films to say; productions skimped on or skipped fact-checking; and field producers never met editors, who themselves were being told to cut to brand messaging and expectation. All the while, audiences have remained largely in the dark with respect to these practices and have tended to accept these stories at face value.In service to the market, commercial productions borrow the mantle of authenticity from public trust in the documentary form to give works more audience appeal. "Documentaries help form the architecture of the studios' brand, signaling that they care about the climate justice, Me Too, and Black Lives Matter movements as well as projecting an image of the organization as transparent, authentic, and truthful," notes a leading documentary scholar (Glick 67). Even programs that are not documentary are reclassified to attract the gloss. Operation Varsity Blues (2021), a fiction docudrama starring Matthew Modine, is classified on Netflix's site as a documentary. Netflix's Tiger King (2020) had many reality-TV aspects, but it was also marketed as a documentary. True-crime series can use the trappings of investigation, while selecting the evidence to oversimplify and crusade. For instance, the Netflix series Making a Murderer slighted evidence against its central characters, leading some to characterize it as "highbrow vigilante justice" (Schulz). But it became wildly popular, and it led to a national petition demanding exoneration.Except for public TV, sponsorship has become a largely unguarded area full of conflict-of-interest possibilities. Maria Schwarzenegger's child's addiction problems with Adderall led her to provide her foundation's funds for a Netflix documentary, Take Your Pills (2018); the foundation's influence is unknown. Verizon fully funded a film by Rory Kennedy, Without a Net (2017), on issues affecting the FCC's e-rate policy; the film does disclose Verizon's full funding, but it does not disclose Verizon's interest in e-rate policy or any contrasting, critical views about how that fund is managed. The film's storytelling effectively builds a pro-Verizon argument for how to allocate those funds. Bill and Melinda Gates's foundation provides funding that results in substantial media production, where funder influence goes unexamined. Paying people for their interviews—even giving them their talking points, as seems to have happened in Tiger King (2020)—goes unscrutinized. Mike Rowe's Six Degrees on Discovery+ is openly funded by fossil fuel corporate interests, as reflected in his constant plugs for fossil fuel (Aufderheide and Woods; Ruwer; Schwab, "Documentaries" and "Journalism's Gates"; Noor).This public trust in documentary has been exploited cynically—or, in some cases, delusionally. Misinformation on COVID-19 was spread widely, for instance, through the documentary Plandemic (2020). ShadowGate (2020) peddled a vast and utterly unsupported conspiracy theory about global cabals. Both were seen by millions on social media before being taken down (Brown; Newton).Documentary also has been weaponized by ideologues, particularly on the right; companies such as Citizens United and Dangerous Documentaries have entire slates. Steve Bannon has leveraged money from extreme-right funders, the Mercer family, to produce scurrilous documentaries such as Clinton Cash (2016) (Goldstein). Michael Pack's Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words (2020) was a fawning portrait of the controversial Supreme Court justice. Pack's self-asserted documentary expertise was used to credential him for his disastrous, if short, leadership of the US Agency for Governmental Media (Gold).Simultaneously, there has been a national conversation about equity and justice, spurred by the racial reckoning that developed from the 2014 police murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. That social movement birthed a range of organizations, including Black Lives Matter, and actions such as wildcat and unionized strikes. The same ferment reached the documentary community. A new but long-brewing conversation blossomed in public, often at film festivals, where typically minoritized filmmakers openly raised questions about what they saw as "extractive" filmmaking—work in which privileged, often white filmmakers parachuted into the communities and stories of minoritized people to tell stories about them to a typically privileged audience.Natalie Bullock Brown, a Black filmmaker and professor, and Sonya Childress, a Black expert in social-action engagement in documentary film and long a member of the Firelight Media group, which promotes and coproduces BIPOC films, jointly described the conversation that was bursting out as a social movement in resistance to a colonizing narrative tradition in documentary: This new class has sounded the call for a reimagining of the nonfiction filmmaking ethos, built on values of accountability, consent and respect for the agency of documented communities; and of a trust-based relationship between director and protagonist. Bearing the weight of a form rooted in Eurocentric ideology, this new class aims to take back nonfiction and use it as a vehicle for both personal expression, and as a tool to strengthen movements, build solidarity across disenfranchised communities, affirm the experiences and history of people in their communities, heal from trauma, and inspire joy and political action. Not unlike the filmmakers of the Third Cinema, this new class has its eye on liberation—from patriarchy, classism, nationalism, racism and capitalist exploitation. (Bullock Brown and Childress)In another article, Childress points out that the lack of formalized ethics code in the documentary field has left deep bias entrenched and unchallenged. She explains: What is lacking are protocols for ethics and accountability across the industry, from filmmaking to artist-service provision. That begins with a full-throated acknowledgement that racial, gender, and class bias are baked into both the artistic form and the industry. From that acknowledgement must come the development of new norms and protocols that represent the diversity of those in the field, and a shift in power and privilege from those who historically held it. Ultimately, new protocols must be built to ensure filmmakers and film institutions do not harm the communities and artists they aim to serve. (Childress)At the same time, organized groups were coalescing within the documentary community, as they were in other sectors. Some of these organizations focus on labor rights; they pull together producers (Documentary Producers Association), editors (Alliance of Documentary Editors ADE), or makers as workers (labor unions including the Writers Guilds East and West). Others are organized around a group struggling for greater media presence—for instance, FWD-DOC (disabled filmmakers), the Undocumented Filmmaker Collective (undocumented immigrant producers), A-Docs (Asian American filmmakers), Brown Girls Doc Mafia (BIPOC women makers), and Beyond Inclusion (a group of producers focusing on pressuring public broadcasting to become more ethnically diverse). This mobilization, including during the pandemic, has had some effect on the field. For instance, there have been meetings between PBS and Beyond Inclusion, and individual filmmakers have adopted some of FWD-DOC's suggestions. It also has changed the tenor of discussion, whether at events such as festivals and conferences or on sites such as D-Word—where ethics is an energetically engaged subsite—and email lists such as D-Word. Independent documentarians have become more self-aware of their collective capacity and of their need to act collectively. Between 2020 and 2022, there were several field-wide conversations on the treatment of participants in Sabaya (Arraf and Khaleel) and Jihad Rehab (Begum), for example; questions also were raised about the use of AI to emulate the voice of Anthony Bourdain in Roadrunner (Rosner). Film festivals began featuring public conversations about non-extractive or care-centered filmmaking.New organizations have begun creating norms-setting documents and resources. For instance, ADE has created guidance on how much time to budget for editing, in response to an industry-wide speedup. FWD-DOC has designed a tool kit for working with disabled team members and participants ("A Toolkit for Inclusion and Accessibility"). BIPOC Doc Editors, at bipocdoceditors.com, has created a database to make it easier to look for a BIPOC editor. Undocumented Filmmakers Collective is developing guidance on working with undocumented participants.The documentary-related organizations that sprang up alongside social movements all turned to the International Documentary Association, the sole national membership organization for documentary filmmakers in the United States, as they organized. The IDA's biannual conference, Getting Real, was a gathering and showcase point. The IDA collaborated on field assessments with, among others, the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2021, when its executive director resigned, it was poised to take a leadership role. However, years of turmoil followed, with leadership crises at both staff and board levels, and the field was left to find other ways to channel the norms-building energy that had been released.All the pressures on filmmakers, particularly minoritized filmmakers, were also felt in media businesses that produce public affairs. They had been drawn over the last two decades to the power of documentary storytelling. There are strong business motivations for journalistically rooted media organizations such as PBS, NBC, The Atlantic, and CNN to enter documentary production. The medium carries prestige, has growing popularity, and is within the general mandate of these mainstream news producers. As smaller players in the media industry, they aim for compelling storytelling that can potentially win awards. At the same time, these outlets' reputation for integrity is key to their brand. In fact, year after year, PBS is rated the most trusted brand in America. That reputation allows such organizations, which cannot compete in some other ways with mega-corporations such as Amazon or Netflix, or which want to boost the part of their company that produces journalistic work, to claim a market niche.Business pressures have forced integrity-brand executives to reexamine their interpretation of standards not developed for the medium, as they both face competitors and strive to extend their own brands into a new environment. Among the changes has been PBS's bold decision to showcase its standards and practices and to develop resources that make them the basis for tutorials for filmmakers, at pbs.org/standards. This is the first time that PBS has made such an in-depth resource openly available to all. Part of its goal, according to the head of its standards department, Talia Rosen, was to ensure that filmmakers who want PBS distribution develop processes that make it possible for PBS to accept their work when finished (personal interview, October 17, 2021). PBS also hopes to encourage a younger generation of producers to see it as a mission-driven organization aligned with producer concerns, in an otherwise ruthlessly commercial environment. Another change has been NBC News Studio's decision to develop filmmaker training workshops, in which they can cultivate new talent and encourage production in accordance with NBC's standards and practices.One organization in this period created new, care-centered, and values-driven protocols focused on a duty of care to participants in documentary. These standards, informed by a years-long process of consultation with the field, have become influential in prompting more conversation and work. Building on the racial reckoning conversation and its related conversations in the independent documentary community, an ad hoc, seven-person group (in which I participate), the Documentary Accountability Working Group (DAWG), formed organically.1 The group is majority BIPOC, members each hold at least twenty years of experience in the field, and they come from several regions of the United States. DAWG's members are well networked into many of the other organizations that have sprung up in the last few years around equity issues. Like many other filmmakers who work on social-issue documentaries, often telling stories from underrepresented constituencies, this group also was alarmed by the implications for field practices from the industry speedup and new money flowing into the sector. Between 2020 and 2022, it created a norms-setting document, From Reflection to Release: A Framework for Values, Ethics and Accountability in Nonfiction Filmmaking (Aufderheide et al.).The research to develop the concepts in this framework was extensive, taking more than two years, and primarily involved direct consultation with members of the independent documentary filmmaking community. The selection was guided by two criteria: an emphasis on BIPOC, women, and minoritized filmmakers and emphasis on film projects featuring BIPOC, women, and minoritized people. The group conducted six closed-door convenings with filmmakers who make such films, engaging more than 100 documentary filmmakers. It also conducted two closed-door convenings with forty people featured in documentary films. Finally, it conducted five sessions between PBS staff and forty-five diverse filmmakers, who shared their understanding of current best practices in working with minoritized participants. Staff of film-support and funding organizations, including Chicken for instance, in the case of Always in Season (2019), a film about a recent lynching, filmmaker Jacqueline Olive filmed the mother of the victim in another town, to not put her at risk of more hostility from white neighbors.Journalistic standards flatly require not showing media in advance of release to participants, to avoid influence on the reporter's decisions. These filmmakers want to explain the process, and often to show their participants the process, including interim edits. For instance, in Outta the Muck (2023), Bhawin Suchak, Ira McKinley, and their team routinely made small, edited packages of current work, simply to show participants the process of turning raw material into documentary.The filmmakers also typically want to show the completed work to the people whose stories they documented before the public sees it; they are concerned about accuracy, about respecting the viewpoint of those people, and about not upsetting or shocking them at the time of release.These documentary filmmakers strongly believe that such measures, by maintaining trust with participants, make the films more accurate, more intimate, more revelatory. At the same time, in the absence of commonly articulated standards and practices other than journalistic ones, they fear sharing their own practices more widely. Nor can they share how they maintain their own autonomy and integrity while providing this duty of care, or to what degree they see themselves fully sharing responsibility for the work's creation with participants. Doing so could potentially cut off avenues of distribution and future work and incur reputational risk should others disagree. These concerns were revealed in part by the difference between their remarks in confidential conversations versus public events; both filmmakers and participants were strikingly more forthcoming in confidential conversations.In addition, because of the tactics that documentary filmmakers use to disguise their actions in support of their participants, they often do not provide transparency to the audience on their relationships, nor do they offer credit to the participants for what may become an editorial and creative contribution to the film. Thus, taking one action to support participants may involve taking other actions that the filmmakers themselves find to be unethical.Further, because of the lack of transparency about process, filmmakers often are unable to find funds appropriate to the need to support participants. For instance, the custom of festivals is to invite a participant without typically covering all or even some costs. But many minoritized participants cannot afford to participate without grievous harm to their monthly budgets. Furthermore, as the group learned from participants, in some cases the participants who hav