Weapons of mass instruction: the rise in popularity of documentaries is putting the heat on everyone from presidents to hamburgers.

NOT SO LONG AGO DOCUMENTARIES WERE THERE kind of movies they showed in civics or P.E. class, barnburners about Paraguay or Joe's lung that were as much fun as watching paint dry. Then Ken Burns came along with The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz, and suddenly it was hip to watch documentaries (and public television). History was cool, informative, and entertaining enough for cable. Now a batch of in-your-face documentaries are at a theater (pretty) near you, and the directors aren't just reporting on America's culture wars, they're waging them.

Michael Moore did the impossible this summer by producing a blockbuster documentary. Even with Disney blocking Miramax's release of the film, Fahrenheit 9/11 grossed over $100 million in U.S. sales in its first month, and early reports indicated record-breaking sales in France and Britain.

Moore has the presidency of George W. Bush in his sights, and his film gives voice and vent to the discontent and rage of millions about this White House's worst excesses and failures. Burns, not Moore, is the filmmaker you want for a polished, balanced, and evenhanded piece of history. But for those dispirited and angered by the 2000 election, the president's response to 9/11 and its aftermath, his family's ties to Saudi oil, and the White House's monomaniacal prosecution of the war in Iraq (and subsequent disinterest in Osama bin Laden or weapons of mass destruction), Moore has fashioned a cri de coeur that resonates across the land.

The early part of the film tracks the president through the fiasco of the Florida recount and the months leading up to 9/11. In the wake of the attack Moore shows us a leader both indecisive and fixated; a man who sits passively for seven minutes after being told the nation is under attack, and who then pursues a war without clear justification.

But Moore really finds his footing when the camera turns from Bush and attends to the victims of White House policies. Footage of American GIs serving in a war they neither understand nor believe in is intermixed with scenes of Iraqi civilians "liberated" by American bombs that killed and maimed their spouses and children. And at home we watch Marines surfing blue-collar mails and inner-city schools for recruits while Moore is unable to find a single member of Congress willing to scud their own children into harm's way.

Here is Moore's most damning accusation. For while the president tells a crowd of "have-mores" that they are his base, Fahrenheit 9/11 reminds us that the cannon fodder for the White House's unnecessary war are the "have-nots."

IF FAHRENHEIT 9/11 FOCUSES ON THE FICTIONS FED TO US BY the White House, Supersize Me is a giant warning label about the menu being served at the Golden Arches. Writer/ director Morgan Spurlock saw a McDonald's ad touting the healthiness of its food and decided to test these claims by conducting an experiment on his own body. For one month he would eat all his meals (happy or otherwise) in one of the company's 30,000 restaurants, and every time a McDonald's associate offered to "supersize" his meal he would agree.

The results are not pretty. Imagine the Subway commercials about an obese Jared eating his way into slender heaven being run backwards and you've got a pretty good picture of Spurlock's descent into the ninth circle of a deep fried inferno. His 5,000 calorie-a-day diet with sky-high levels of saturated fat, sodium, and sugar causes him to gain 30 pounds and his blood pressure to soar while his moods and energy peak and plummet like a rollercoaster. Within three weeks his doctors are worried his heart or liver could give out.

Of course almost no one eats fast food at all their meals, and no one forced Spurlock to do so. Still, America's obesity epidemic is surely tied to our outrageous consumption of fast food, and, as Spurlock shows in his film, millions of our children are being served this unhealthy diet in school. Perhaps Spurlock's point is that what fast food franchises are really serving are future heart attacks and liver failures.

Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott take aim at more than one industry in The Corporation, a clever critique of the large multinational companies that have come to shape our modern economic life. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that corporations have the legal status and freedoms of a person, and Achbar and Abbott want to ask just what type of a person a corporation is. So they set out to do a psychological profile of corporations based on the way they work and play with others.

Their diagnosis is not flattering. Corporations, it turns out, are economic engines with a narcissistic, even pathological, personality. With their single-minded commitment to improving profits and consuming every competitor in sight, they seem uninterested in the health and well-being of their employees or neighbors, or the protection of the environment or the common good.

Achbar and Abbott argue that the abuses of sweatshops and environmental destruction are not accidents but flow from personality traits embedded in the very core of corporations. As one psychiatrist reports in the film, corporations have "all the characteristics of a prototypical psychopath."

TWO OTHER RECENT FILMS FIRE A shot across the bows of our news corporations. Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel gets blasted by Robert Greenleaf's Outfoxed, which sets out to show that the station has no legitimate claim to call its coverage "fair and balanced." Greenleaf's complaint is that Fox simply parrots White House "talking points," serving more as a government news agency than a member of a free press. Through interviews with former Fox employees and footage from its most popular programs, Greenleaf offers Fox the sort of treatment it has reserved for liberals and other critics of the president's agenda.

Meanwhile, Jehane Nouhaim's fascinating documentary about Al Jazeera examines the Arab satellite news network branded by the White House as a propaganda machine. In Control Room Nouhaim follows the Al Jazeera crew as it struggles to cover the war in Iraq, laboring alongside other news agencies and interfacing with U.S. military personnel who offer the official government version of events. The result is more interesting and complex than any set of presuppositions would lead us to expect, and the questions raised about truth, objectivity, and democracy are troubling. Nouhaim has done a service for all interested in a truly free press.

THE RISE OF THE MUCKRAKER DOCUmentary is a function of the failure of our government and media to tell the truth about tough issues. While politicians have long put a spin on the stories they tell us, the press has not always been such a willing and silent partner in these misdeeds. But when embedded reporters and corporate media regurgitate government statements as if they were oracles from Olympus or Sinai, the pressure to speak out builds until it pops out in a scream. To paraphrase Robert Frost, "something there is that does not love a lie, that sends the frozen ground-swell under it and spills the upper boulders in the sun." These documentaries are the cries of those who cannot stand the official silence about the costs of empire, consumerism, creeping jingoism, and environmental destruction.

Critics argue that these muckraking populist documentaries are not fair, or, more to the point, balanced. Maybe, but they are balancing. In an age when the rich and powerful oppressed widows, orphans, and aliens, Yahweh's prophets raised a cry against the greed and violence of the high and mighty and called for a preferential option for the poor. In an age when the White House and corporations keep us from seeing the whole truth about their activities and spend billions controlling the stories we read, these new filmmakers raise a balancing cry on behalf of the unheard and the unseen. That is reason enough to watch them in civics class.

By PATRICK MCCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.