Director and producer Andrew Rossi (Ivory Tower, Page One: Inside The New York Times), explores the dark side of disinformation, or ‘fake news,’ in a new documentary executive produced by CNN’s Brian Stelter titled AFTER TRUTH: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News. AFTER TRUTH will broadcast as a CNN Films Presents feature Saturday, August 29 at 10:00pm Eastern (7:00pm Pacific).

Through exclusive interviews with purveyors and victims of fake news, Rossi reveals the terrible human toll of false information, Russian troll farm-disseminated sentiment, and manipulated videos (so-called “deep fakes”), across partisan lines. Consumers have come to know many of these conspiracy theories by their shorthand labels, “QAnon,” “Pizzagate,” “birtherism,” “Wikileaks,” and more. In August 2019, nearly a year prior to the 2020 national election, the FBI determined these fringe theories to pose such a threat to democracy, they are classified as potential forms of domestic terrorism.

Interviewed for AFTER TRUTH are: James Alefantis, owner of Comet Ping Pong, the D.C pizza restaurant smeared by a near-deadly conspiracy theory fomented by political podcast and TV hosts; Keith Alexander, Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter for The Washington Post; Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law professor (co-author, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, 2018); Jack Burkman, self-professed propagator of “fake news”; Jerome Corsi, author and conspiracy theorist; Oliver Darcy, CNN senior media reporter; Adam Goldman, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, The New York Times (co-author, Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America, 2013); Professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, University of Pennsylvania (Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, 2018); disinformation expert, Molly McKew; Aaron Rich, brother of DNC staffer Seth Rich; Scott Shane, reporter for The New York Times (author, Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone, 2016); Will Sommer, tech reporter for The Daily Beast; Kara Swisher, technology business journalist, columnist, The New York Times; co-founder, Recode; Elizabeth Williamson, New York Times feature writer; and others.