War on Terror – war on democracy? The post 9/11 investigative documentary To be printed in Northern Lights. Film & Media Studies Yearbook, vol. 7, Oct. 2009. Ib Bondebjerg Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen Abstract This article deals with the effect of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror on media in the United States, the United Kingdom and Denmark. The focus is particularly on documentary films and programmes and the investigative genre. Structural and long-term media developments in both the United States and Europe have, since 2000, undermined and weakened the role of critical, investigative documentaries. The effect of the War on Terror on media and democratic, public dialogue and criticism was clearly a further weakening of dissenting, documentary voices. The strong tradition in Europe for public service film and television cultures had to face up to severe political criticism and attacks on their independence when broadcasting critical documentaries on the War on Terror, and in the United States the independent voices were even more marginalized from the mainstream media. Keywords Investigative journalism, documentary genres, War on Terror, 9/11, political communication, media and democracy When the terrorists hit the Twin Towers on the fatal day of 9/11 it was not just a human tragedy, but also a political and symbolic media event with far reaching consequences for American and global politics. In war truth is always the first victim, an old saying goes. Subsequent investigations into the political events leading to first the war in Afghanistan and in particular the war in Iraq, indicate that many of the basic assumptions that led to the War on Terror were fabricated, and that the media were used, as Danny Schechter has called it, as ‘Weapons of mass deception (Schechter 2006 and 2006 b)’. When deception becomes the mainstream and events lead to widespread bending of the fundamental human rights, as critics and many documentary films and books now indicate (see for instance, Mayer 2008) then the War on Terror is in danger of becoming also a war on democracy. In Jane Mayer’s remarkable and detailed account of American post 9/11 politics, The Dark side (2008), she quotes both the Columbia Law professor Scott Horton, and the republican legal activist, Bruce Fein, for saying that the Bush-administration has extended the executive powers of the presidency in a way that is unprecedented in earlier history and even goes beyond the normal extension of that power in earlier war periods: ‘His war powers allow him to