Talk:I Am Jane Doe
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NPOV Problems/Promotional tone
[edit]This article seems to take a highly positive stance towards the film and its portrayal of the subject matter, with opinionated and biased wording present pretty much everywhere. Lemme list the examples:
- I am Jane Doe is a documentary chronicling the legal battle that several American mothers are waging on behalf of their middle-school daughters who were trafficked for commercial sex on Backpage.com, the classified advertising website formerly owned by the Village Voice.
"Legal battle" and "waging" are clearly hyping up the case, and "daughters who were trafficked for commercial sex on Backpage.com" is taking a factual stance on a real, ongoing legal case when best practice is to state this as being the view of the film or filmmakers. One example of an article that does this correctly is Bowling for Columbine, which manages to cleanly distance itself from any positive or negative opinion on the film's claims while minimizing overly contrived wording. And while I won't claim WP:BLP, since the negativity regards a corporate entity rather than a natural person, I just want to point out that this sort of thing is a bad look regardless. Moving on...
- Their suits against Backpage put them on a collision course with judges, special interest groups, and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Bad wording is subtle, but still present; this reads like a quote from the IMDb synopsis or official promo, Wikipedia articles about films tend to be more matter of fact when not directly quoting official sources.
- The film also features the attorneys involved with the various lawsuits. The lawyers hail from anywhere from a firm working out of strip mall in Washington state to Ropes & Gray, one of the oldest white-shoe law firms in the country.
This is hyping up the involved attorneys, you can describe the diverse backgrounds of the individuals involved without being grandiose about it, and you especially don't need to hype up a tangentially related real-life law firm. Honestly, I kind of doubt this part is relevant to a summary of the doc anyways, this should have more info on the actual proceedings portrayed.
- I am Jane Doe also follows Congressional actions against Backpage and online human trafficking.
Blatantly lumping together "Backpage" and "human trafficking" in the same sentence, come on now.
Additionally, while this is more of a quality critique rather than a POV thing, most good movie articles I've read put in at least one contrarian review, or at the very least criticisms from overall positive reviews, taking into account due weight of course; this movie is a 61/100 on Metacritic, which while generally positive is hardly unanimous.
I'm gonna put up the Template:Advert tag instead of Template:NPOV, since this regards a product rather than a general topic; anyone can feel free to replace it if I'm wrong on how the template is supposed to be used. I would start on making changes myself, but I'm too concerned that I myself am too much of a shitter for this sort of thing, so it would probably be better if someone other than me took a go at it. 2601:402:C202:BA70:DC52:40EC:FD76:D20F (talk) 00:10, 30 November 2022 (UTC)