(Note: Here’s the movie that headlined the 2024 edition of Vancouver’s “premier social justice film festival.” Last year it was Navalny. Look no further for evidence of the total capture of so-called progressive thought in Canada, where a Waffen-SS collaborator received a standing ovation in Parliament. What a pitiful joke of a country. Help.)

Patrick Forbes’s doc begins with the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 to Dmitry Muratov, Russian journalist and editor of the independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. The late muckraker John Pilger responded to the occasion by labeling Nobel “an instrument of Western propaganda”, which is worth mentioning because The Price of Truth is explicitly about censorship and propaganda. It’s a well-made film, not immune to criticism, in fact mostly garbage, covering the demise of Novaya Gazeta following the advent of conflict in Ukraine. Founded with the help of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1993 (using his Nobel prize money), Novaya Gazeta has done some good work, particularly around the Chechen wars. A number of its journalists have been murdered and Muratov himself was permanently wounded by Russian security thugs over his opposition to the war. The Price of Truth follows the bear-like editor around the world as he presides over the paper’s demise, first relocating to Latvia (**cough**) and then having its license revoked by an increasingly intolerant government communications agency.

Muratov himself is rabidly anti-Putin, so the fate of the Novaya Gazeta is hardly unexpected, but this is a movie for Western viewers. Ukraine is central to the story, yet there’s no mention of the 2014 Maidan coup, NATO expansion, any of the US-led provocations that plunged the country into far-right extremism and invited war. Instead, Muratov wonders if Putin simply went mad while isolated with COVID. It’s childish and insulting, whatever your view of the conflict. Still—there should be no state crackdown on journalists, in Russia or anywhere else, and the film ends with a long and sorry list of Moscow-deemed “foreign agents” like Muratov, some of them jailed. And on critical public matters like Ukraine, Novaya Gazeta deserves the right to publish whatever it wants. To this end, The Price of Truth is 100 percent correct. In a healthy exchange of perspectives with a sincere desire for honesty, however, it also needs to be called out on its own momentous and dangerous bullshit, while we might also consider how we treat our own dissident journalists and the propaganda methods, different but no less effective, by which we shape Western political consensus.

February 2024