Review: ‘After Truth,’ the Deluge

An often-chilling survey of disinformation in America, this HBO documentary reclaims the real definition of “fake news. ” It is a fitting irony that the term “fake news” has become itself fraudulent, appropriated, by Donald Trump and his imitators, to dismiss legitimate reporting that they deem damaging, disrespectful or insufficiently flattering. But before there was this fake news, there was real fake news, an ecosystem of rumors, conspiracy theories, frauds and hoax stories, some of which were deployed in 2016 to boost President Trump’s campaign. It’s this modern weapon that is the subject of HBO’s “After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News,” a broad but darkly engrossing documentary that airs Thursday.

“After Truth,” directed by Andrew Rossi and executive produced by CNN’s Brian Stelter, makes clear that fake news is not something invented in 2016 or limited to partisan politics. It is abetted by modern information technology, but the root of this evil is opportunism and cynicism. The voice of that root, opening the documentary and reappearing throughout, is Jack Burkman, a conservative political operator and unashamed fake-out artist. “What is truth?

” he asks, echoing the mantra of such paragons as the “Simpsons” lawyer Lionel Hutz. “If you study philosophy, there’s no reality, only perception. ” In Burkman’s view, disinformation is like a chemical weapon: It’s poisonous, but it works, so you might as well use it before the enemy does. “After Truth” sets out a history, albeit a brief and recent one, that shows how the miasma of lies was growing well before the 2016 election.

Its first case study is the 2015 panic — driven by actors like Alex Jones’s Infowars tinfoil-hat media empire — that Jade Helm, a U. S. military exercise planned for the American southwest, was a cover for a plan to round up political dissidents and imprison them in former Walmart stores. As ludicrous as that story may seem, it also became consuming, and “After Truth” interviews not just experts and journalists (some from The Times) but also people in the affected communities.

Troy Michalik, a gun-store owner in Bastrop, Tex. , recalls how the rumors agitated conservative neighbors, already whipped up to mistrust the Obama administration, into “making puzzle pieces fit together. ” And a lack of commonly agreed-on facts doesn’t help.