In a now famous speech, the great American broadcast journalist Edward R Murrow said of television: “This instrument can teach, illuminate, yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.
“Otherwise it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box.”
Murrow had taken issue with television executives’ decision to disregard hard-hitting news coverage for entertainment programming, deemed more attractive to advertisers.
The medium, he believed, was extraordinarily powerful, but unless it was used to educate and inform people about serious issues, it was about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
Murrow proved to be prophetic. Television did become a distraction to numb workers at the end of the day, as well as a conduit for fast food companies, detergent manufacturers and insurance brokers to flog their goods.
News programming itself became a brand, rather than a valuable and trusted information source.
What Murrow did not foresee those six decades ago, was the rise of the investigative documentary genre, nor the advent of streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon Prime and to a lesser extent, Showmax.
While these platforms are known for series and movies, they also offer a strong documentary component — and people are watching.
Whether it is because the precarious times in which we live call for greater understanding, or if it’s more a case of people not having the inclination or time to read books, the jury is still out, but there is definitely a desire to know more.
Social media has proved resoundingly inept as an information resource, and offers absolutely no context to anything.
Filmmakers have recognised this, and the result is some of the best documentaries going around.
The Netflix series A Perfect Crime is a prime example of what painstaking research, thorough analysis and sharp historical context can produce.
Humans like to perceive things in a rosy light, and that is especially true when it comes to different parts of the world.
Often people talk about the “South African miracle” yet the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow remains elusive.
When Robert Mugabe stepped down, it was hoped that Zimbabwe would turn a corner. It hasn’t.
And when Aung San Suu Kyi became Myanmar’s de facto leader in 2016, it was thought democracy would flourish. Instead hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled gross human rights abuses.
On the surface, Germany looks to be a million miles apart from these countries, but as A Perfect Crime shows, looks can be deceiving.
The 1990 assassination of Detlev Rohwedder, who was tasked with privatising state land and companies in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), has never been solved.
A terrorist group called the Red Army Faction claimed responsibility for the killing, but a deeper analysis shows there could well have been other forces at play.
The people interviewed for the series, many of whom grew up and lived in the GDR, make no effort to hide their disdain for elements of Germany’s reunification, even if it has been three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Archive footage of Rohwedder’s television interviews shortly before his death do not portray him in a particularly good light.
He was the caricature of Milton Friedman capitalism — deadpan, grey-suited and ruthless in the pursuit of economic gain. Shedding thousands of jobs and what it meant for the families of those who lost them hardly crossed his mind.
No question it was a Herculean task to bring the former East Germany into the fold, but the way he went about his business left a lot to be desired.
The crime investigation aspect of the series provides plenty of intrigue, but even more fascinating is what the long-term effect of Rohwedder’s policies were.
The old systems he imposed are crumbling, and with that, the resentment of former GDR citizens is beginning to surface.
As an explainer of current attitudes and the root cause, A Perfect Crime is a masterpiece.
You sense Murrow would be proud.
• “A Perfect Crime” is a 4-part docuseries available for streaming from Netflix; each episode runs to around 40-45 min.
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