Steyerl refers to a kind of “unbroken belief” in documentaries. A documentary is a form of recorded media that provides a factual account of some non-fiction subject. To watch a documentary understanding that everything on screen is entirely true is the “unbroken belief” that Steyerl describes. However, the belief in documentaries has been broken. Steyerl describes how some images in documentaries “bear no similarity to reality.” As a result, “we have no basis for judging whether reality is being shown here in any objective way.” The way that documentaries are filmed rely on the emotional content of the media to tell the audience how to feel about certain events. At times, the emotional information is more legible than the factual information in a documentary.

One way that this is done is through the lack of focus in documentary media, which simultaneously removes clarity and increases the image’s sense of reality. Steyerl believes that it is precisely this sense of live recording, which is lower resolution, shakier, without editing, that gives an image a sense of credibility. These things which we associate with raw footage give content a sense of being unaltered and pure fact, even if by lacking focus and clarity, it becomes easier to misrepresent the truth.