Democracy may die in the darkness, but it is when the three of them come alive.Īnd once the initial shock of watching them pray for violent deaths and mass carnage wears off, you realise that while the ethics of chasing these frankly salacious stories for financial gain are shady at best, Howard, Zak and Scott are just as weathered as any investigative journalist, just as streetwise as any crime reporter, and just as brave as any editor in search of the truth. Howard, Zak and Scott are independent ‘journalists’ who prowl the street of LA at night, armed with police scanners and camera equipment, looking for stories to sell to news channels in the morning – the bigger the disaster the better. In the three men that it makes its subjects, Shot in the Dark explores an almost subterranean offshoot of journalism: Stringing – specifically, in Los Angeles, at night. It isn’t about weathered investigative journalists, working months on cracking a cover-up it isn’t about streetwise crime reporters, juggling friendships with cops and criminals and nor is it about brave editors, constantly challenging and supporting the truth. It was – and still is, despite the Post’s declaration that it wasn’t made as a response to Trump – a grand, and far too rare statement by journalists about the difficult situation their profession finds itself in.Īnd while the death of journalism can come in many forms, you’d be hard-pressed to find one as unexpected as the sort shown in Shot in the Dark, the new documentary series on Netflix – a show that I must admit took me by surprise (I had no idea it existed until it popped up on my suggestions) and compelled me to write about it. It was too much of a coincidence, considering especially that the newspaper had publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton in the race, and Trump’s habit of incessantly attacking the press. The juiciest interpretation of “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” aided in no small part by the fact that it was adopted a month after Donald Trump’s swearing in as President, was that the Post was, characteristically, taking a swipe at him.
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