The Truth vs. Alex Jones

Director Dan Reed obtained exclusive access to the trial of fabulist radio host Alex Jones, defendant in a lawsuit filed by the parents of slain schoolchildren from Sandy Hook, Connecticut. The titular battle comes to seem unevenly matched: the truth—that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook upended these families’ lives—struggles to make itself heard against Jones, whose shameless willingness to claim the event was staged and the grieving families are actors only compounded harm. What emerges is a painful, clarion double portrait—both of Jones, a former public-access TV huckster whose readiness to say absolutely anything brought him fame and wealth, and of the society his untruths continue to radically reshape. The Truth vs. Alex Jones exposes one man’s dishonesty, and his capacity to spin money out of others’ misfortune. It also diagnoses a deeper social rot, as only a society in which trust is badly fraying could elevate Jones over a shared sense of objective reality. For its clear-eyed conviction and urgent but never strident insistence that we work to honor real facts in the face of conspiracy thinking, The Truth vs. Alex Jones wins a Peabody Award.