Documentary ‘ABCs of Book Banning’ Gets a ‘D’ for Dishonesty

It’s fairly stunning how a lot dishonesty and disinformation you possibly can pack into a 27-minute “documentary” movie. (Twenty-five minutes, in case you don’t rely the 2 minutes of credit on the finish.)

But the dishonesty and disinformation in “The ABCs of Book Banning”—streaming now on Paramount+—is a minimum of as a lot an act of omission as one of fee.

The MTV Documentary Films manufacturing opens with a scrolling introduction claiming that “[o]ver 2,000 books have been removed from school districts in the United States. These books have been labeled RESTRICTED, CHALLENGED, [or] BANNED and are generally not available to millions of students in up to 37 states.”

It then introduces us to Grace Linn, an offended centenarian who’s proven scolding the Martin County, Florida, School Board about “book banning” on March 21. (Linn shouldn’t be confused with award-winning youngsters’s e book author-illustrator Grace Lin.)

You know you’ve misplaced the argument when you need to resort to likening the opposite facet to Nazis. But that’s precisely what Linn does, explaining that her husband was killed in motion in World War II preventing for freedom, the Constitution, and the First Amendment.

“One of the freedoms that the Nazis crushed was the freedom to read the books they banned,” she says, a quote that’s repeated close to the top of the movie—the second time over archival footage of World War II-era Nazi book-burning bonfires.

“Banned books and burning books are the same. Both are done for the same reason—fear of knowledge,” Linn provides, for demagogic impact.

What’s not clear from the movie is how a lot data Linn really has concerning the explicit nature of the content material of probably the most controversial of the books on the middle of the ongoing national debate over what ought to and shouldn’t be on college library cabinets and in classroom curriculums.

That’s simply the primary of many examples of how “ABCs” is responsible of bias by omission

The narrator-free movie proceeds to point out a sequence of photos of dozens of books that the documentary claims have been “challenged, restricted, or banned.” Short excerpts of textual content from every e book scroll throughout the display because the books are launched, and that’s the place the dishonesty actually revs up.

Documentaries sometimes function commentary from “talking heads” who presumably know what they’re speaking about. “The ABCs of Book Banning,” nevertheless, takes its title from the truth that most of the speaking heads listed below are precocious prepubescents, who clearly don’t.

“The voices of those who support book banning have been heard,” the movie explains. “This film features the voices of those who have not been heard … the children.”

The filmmakers successfully exploit these children—most of them 10 years outdated or youthful—for sympathetic impact. They nearly definitely have been coached to say what producer-director Sheila Nevins, the previous president of HBO Documentary Films, wished them to say. That just about may be boiled right down to one thing akin to “How could you do this to us?”

“They’ve pulled all the award-winning books,” laments Ruth Anne, 10, a fourth grader in Jacksonville, Florida. “Why take away all these excellent books? It’s like you’re trying to slow down children’s reading. Why do that?”

That brings us again to the quick excerpts of textual content cited from every of the “challenged, restricted, or banned” books in query.

Viewers who’re unfamiliar with the most-contested books cited can be forgiven for not understanding what the controversy is about, as a result of the excerpts are nearly all innocuous and undoubtedly not probably the most salacious or pornographic sections. That is unquestionably by design.

Although the documentary doesn’t attempt (as a result of the title is a giveaway) to hide the character of, for instance, “The Hips on the Drag Queen Goes Swish, Swish, Swish” by an creator recognized as Little Miss Hot Mess, viewers unfamiliar with “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George Johnson and “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison aren’t advised that the contents embrace extraordinarily graphic descriptions of gay intercourse acts.

Nor are viewers knowledgeable concerning the express nature of “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, billed because the “most banned book in America,” though the title is definitely a purple flag. (We received’t get into the precise content material of these LGBTQ books right here, however they simply could also be discovered on-line if one is of a sufficiently prurient persuasion.)

LGBTQ novels aren’t the one books the movie complains about being topic to cheap restrictions on entry by minors in colleges, additionally with out explaining what’s objectionable. One such tome is the anti-American “The 1619 Project” by black racist Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times, which regardless of successful a Pulitzer Prize has been extensively criticized by famend historians and the National Association of Scholars as historic revisionism at its worst.

And but, “the Times launched an extensive educational partnership with the Pulitzer Center as soon as the project was published, which has helped enshrine ‘1619’ falsehoods in countless K-12 schools,” wrote the affiliation’s David Acevedo. That would recommend the e book’s widespread availability regardless of any makes an attempt to suppress it.

“ABCs” additional seeks to lend objectionable books an undeserved halo effect by juxtaposing them with restrictions on classics reminiscent of “The Hobbit,” “The Kite Runner,” “Slaughterhouse-Five,” and “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.” But as with all the opposite examples, it doesn’t cite any of the “who, what, when, where, or why” particulars of stated restrictions.

Finally, to the extent that these books are—in Ruth Anne’s phrases—being “pulled” and “taken away” from lecture rooms and faculty libraries, it’s dishonest for this documentary (or Linn, or anybody else) to characterize such actions as a “ban.”

All of the books cited stay accessible for buy at bookstores and on-line. Parents are free to purchase them for their minor youngsters—even when they’re not age-appropriate and even when many of us would regard that as baby abuse.

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