Case Study: Bernie Blackout, a Fast Turnaround Documentary for Vice

Peter Hamilton takes a deep dive into the fast-track production of Bernie Blackout: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, in a detailed case study on his site Documentarytelevision.com, and in a podcast interview with the film’s director Pat McGee, who set out at the end of 2019 to investigate whether the Sanders campaign was being “sabotaged by corporate media bias and the mainstream press.” It’s a fascinating look at the process of bringing a timely program to air in just a few short months, with the added obstacle of the COVID-19 lockdown on post-production work.

Bernie Blackout is “really about two stories,” McGee says in the podcast. “One story was about the supporters and the people that were supporting him. And the other was the investigative look into the corporate media’s and mainstream press’s take on Bernie Sanders.”

McGee juxtaposes footage he and his team shot on the campaign trail between January 31 and March 11 with coverage of the Sanders campaign from CNN, MSNBC and other mainstream media outlets, most of which was fair-used, to show the contrast between the “electric” energy and emotion of the Sanders campaign and the negative tone of much of the mainstream media coverage.

“We’re on the campaign trail and we’re capturing this visceral, this emotive experience of all these people supporting Bernie Sanders,” McGee says in the interview. “But at the end of the day, there’s this other narrative, and that narrative is what’s going on in the media. One thing we really wanted to tap into was that experience and the emotion that was in these campaign rallies. And that was something that you never really saw on the news.”

Click here to read Peter’s full case study, and here to listen to his interview with director Pat McGee.