Occasional Paper-The bias of the producer

I recently watched a documentary about the Titanic produced by James Cameron, who directed the feature film, Titanic.  Actually, I think the show was a documentary about making a documentary, which is all the better for purposes of this occasional paper.  Flush with cash from his successful movie career, Cameron wanted to finally and definitively answer all the lingering questions about the sinking of the Titanic. He assembled an impressive array of experts to assist him in his quest for answers.  There were several engineers from different specialties, naval historians, representatives from the company that built the Titanic, underwater salvage experts, experts in determining the cause of ship sinking, experts in force and stress, and myriad other experts with experience and training in ship engineering, ship building and ship wrecks.  Cameron also had the most advanced technologies available to these experts.  They had two mini-submarines equipped with lights and cameras in which they crawled all over the wreck of the Titanic and the floor of the sea around the wreck, recording in great detail the wreck and the debris that surrounded it.  Then, Cameron gathered all of these experts in a big room with a huge screen upon with they could show film, pictures and diagrams, and they all set out to analyze the evidence and to answer once and for all how and why the Titanic sank.

What quickly became apparent, however, was that James Cameron had his own hypotheses about how and why the Titanic sank, and exactly what  happened that fateful night and why it happened.  It was soon apparent that Cameron was not so much interested in determining exactly what happened and why as he was in proving his own preconceived notions about what happened and why.  He would actually shout down any expert who tried to disagree with him.  After a few futile attempts to advance their own theories, based on their training and expertise, these experts, in the face of Cameron's steamrolling, would shrug their shoulders and give up. I don't suggest that Cameron set out to change history or to cover anything up.  I don't even think he was aware of what he was doing.  What I do mean to suggest is that Cameron is a man of significant ego, with a very high opinion of his own intellect and powers of deduction, and he was funding the entire enterprise, including paying the experts.  Therefore, this documentary, in the end, would be a statement of James Cameron's theories of how the Titanic tragedy occurred and why. This got me worrying that people would watch this documentary and think that they were learning historical fact, when in fact they would be learning James Cameron's version of history.

I have long been troubled by Hollywood's version of history.  Not so much troubled by the fact that Hollywood chooses to make entertaining films about historical events and historical characters, as troubled by the fact that the history depicted in these films is so often bad and often just wrong.  It has always concerned me that the only exposure to history that many people get is through films and television, and that they will come to think what they saw on the screen is historical fact.

The concern of producer bias doesn't stop at film and television.  One must consider the bias of the writer of historical works of non-fiction and even history textbooks.  It is the equivalent, if you will, of James Cameron writing a book about the sinking of the Titanic with the same inherent bias that went into his production of the documentary film.

I think it is incumbent on all social studies teachers to warn their students to always consider the potential bias of the producer of any historical document, including their own text books, and to seek out as many other source materials as they can to compare one to another.  It would be incumbent upon every social studies teacher to make those other source materials available to their students.  As a social studies teacher, I will also warn my students to be careful of the history that they see on movie and television screens, and to thoroughly research those historical depictions in other source materials before they form their own opinions.
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