The Walkley Foundataion an Alliance Initiative

Documentary makers Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith once beat box-office megastar Avatar with their feature documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America. It was number one on the “best reviewed” critical consensus list, ahead of Avatar which was only 10^th out of 20.

The documentary focuses on the transformation of a Cold War warrior named Dan Ellsberg, a Harvard graduate who studied decision theory. His job at the Pentagon was to research the Vietnam War and predict scenarios that might result in nuclear war.

So thorough was his research, he returned to Vietnam, years after serving there as a marine, to assess his country's position in the on-going war. It was then he realised he was on the side that was perpetuating lies.

It was a conversation with a war resister who was going to jail that changed his life – and he also fell in love with an anti-war advocate who took him to the other side of the tracks.

In June 1971, Ellsberg photocopied 7000 pages of a report on the Vietnam War and gave them to The New York Times. He abandoned a glittering career as a Pentagon adviser to the Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara and betrayed his colleagues to stop the Vietnam War.

“This film is about this courageous person and it’s also about the courage of these [media] institutions,” says Ehrlich.

“I think it is the finest moment in American media history and also one of the finest moments of the US Supreme Court who decided to support the papers publishing, which the White House … the White House essentially came in and closed down the papers.

“It pre-censored the papers before they published after the first day at The New York Times.

“The Washington Post picked up the mantle, defying the edict, after they had closed down The New York Times. And then they closed down The Washington Post.

“And in the meantime Ellsberg, who’s underground, and his wife Patricia got copies – not all 7000 pages but many thousands of pages – to 17 other papers who also defied the government and published.

“It was sort of virally spreading in the way that it could during the days of so many newspapers.

“It was an amazing moment that so many people had courage and so many people in the media stood up for the right thing, knowing that they were really risking their institutions – they could have lost their newspapers,” she says.

“I think that it makes it easier to control a population when they’re not thinking deeply or clearly and don’t have the information out there at their fingertips and are being fed misinformation constantly, like the Fox Network does.

“They are always trying to make everyone into enemies rather than looking deeply at issues. That kind of interpretation of the news is extremely debilitating.”

Her documentary took four years and $800,000 to make. “It’s not out there with the nightly news but I think that giving people an opportunity to get some sense of the background of a story, and see the evolution of a person who totally transformed … these kinds of big issues are very different from what we see on the nightly news and in the commercial media,” says Ehrlich.

“Journalism is incredibly important but it’s very threatened. It’s in transition right now. If we want to have an informed population we have to have good journalism.”

Good journalism does cost money and Ehrlich believes new media models should be based on the models of independent press that she profiles in the film.

“We need journalism on the internet if that’s how we get it,” she says.

“There’s always the question of what is a national security risk. Certain things are. Dan Ellsberg has never said, and I’ve certainly never said, that everything is a free for all and anything can be revealed. He was extremely careful that nothing that was revealed in the Pentagon Papers had any national security threat.

“One of the messages of this film is about the misuse of the secrecy act. Another lesson of this film is that we need to look at media models from times when people did have courage. I think the media at that moment had an enormous amount of courage and I think we need to aspire to media that has some sense of independence and understands the importance of telling the truth.”

Ehrlich attributes her success in selling the film around the world, including Australia, to the fact that its truth is universal.

“We’re living in a period where it’s all tabloid journalism,” she says. “The important issues are hard to find information about, and we’re deluged with information about celebrities.”

She laughs because this kind of gossip news is always available. “They are all flawed people,” she points out.

“This film focuses on the right issues and I hope that it encourages audiences to focus on the right issues and demand better,” she says.

Lisa Yallamas is a Queensland newspaper journalist and online multi-media producer. Images courtesy of Gil Scrine Films.