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By Peter Viglietta, Justine Januszkiewicz, Derek Degraad,
Amanda Armocida, Ann Marie Trietley and Gerret Swearingen
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It’s a clever touch, the lone lowercase "i" in the title of Moore’s movie SiCKO. Is it a subliminal allusion to Moore’s potent first-person journalistic style, or a latently rude doffing-of-the-hat to those who criticize him for marinating his video footage in the subtle truculence of his opinion juices?
Probably the former. The truth is, Moore has never doffed his hat to anyone, not even at the Oscars in 2002 when he took the Best Documentary category for Bowling for Columbine.
Moore seemed to have little to say in his defense at the University of Buffalo when a student asked him a question concerning the significant number of viewers who said his work was one-sided and called him a propagandist. His response was that the opinion that plasters work is meant to counterbalance the one-sidedness of outlets such as CNN, who he said are the real propagandists.
SiCKO, Moore’s most recent visual blog, brings up long-pondered philosophical questions; if you’re not telling the whole story, but only part of it, are you lying? What if you’re deliberately leaving pertinent information out? Moore would most likely argue that the importance of saving the world fully outweighs the importance of answering that question.
One can see why so many people are upset with Moore, and why a campaign arose in ‘03 to revoke his 2002 Oscar. His critics (by which we do mean Internet enemies) began finding specific examples to question the extent to which Bowling for Columbine was actually a “documentary.”
A quick Google search will bring up pages upon pages of independent Moore debunkers who post articles pointing out instances of Moore’s glaring lapses in credibility. GunOwners.org, for example, takes issue with specific segments in Bowling for Columbine.
The non-profit site reports that, in a segment that exposes a bank that gives guns as gifts to new account holders, Moore arranged the scene so that he would receive the gun on-site, when in fact the guns had to be picked up at a different location.
In the movie, Moore asked the woman, “don’t you think it’s dangerous to be handing out guns in a bank?”
Then they cite an interview in which Jan Jacobson, the woman who worked at the bank and appeared in the movie giving Moore the gun. Jacobson reportedly said (after seeing the movie) that Moore tricked her into doing the interview by saying he was an NRA member from Michigan. Jacobson went on to say that Moore’s editing team chose to leave out the hour-long process that went into distributing the guns, portraying her as “some backwoods idiot, mindlessly handing out guns.”
Even more frightening than the fact that Moore doesn’t seem to realize that documentaries should be theater-free expositions of reality is the fact that Moore, who was named one of the world’s most influential people by TIME magazine in 2005, is guilty of one of the five requisite elements of libel- a lack of thorough reporting.
In SiCKO, which dropped in late 2007, Moore moseys through countries that have government-run health care systems, dryly but incredulously asking medical employees “so, I don’t have to pay any money for this?”
The common criticism of SiCKO is that Moore either neglected or was careless in giving light to the many problems that these other countries currently face with their public health care systems.
The first and perhaps most relevant comparison he makes to America’s private health system is that of Canada. Moore is right on when he describes the greed and corruption that has become a part of America’s under-regulated, profit-driven HMOs. The people and stories in the film are real and in many cases heartbreaking, and any humane person would agree after viewing that something is wrong here.
However, another Google search will deliver serious talking points regarding the question of the financial sustainability of Canada’s health program. In February of 2006, The New York Times published an article entitled “As Canada's Slow-Motion Public Health System Falters, Private Medical Care Is Surging.”
The article exposed the growing popularity of private health insurance companies and clinics across Canada as the public health service was becoming increasingly overburdened. They cited a study that showed that average waiting period between a referral by a family doctor and an appointment with a specialist had increased to 8.3 weeks in 2005 from 3.7 weeks in 1993.
Not to mention the fact that it doesn’t take a whole lot of research to realize that the happy Canadians interviewed in the hospitals are mostly emergency room patients, and not those who require major surgeries for chronic illness.
If SiCKO came out in late 2007, and the article was published in early 2006, Moore should have to feel the wrath of the blogosphere for putting his name on an obviously one-sided (albeit extremely entertaining), dismally uninformed report.
It’s also worth noting that Moore’s work has undoubtedly teetered on the brink of conspiracy theorem. In Fahrenheit 911, Moore accused President Bush of protecting immediate members of the Bin Laden family by quietly expediting them out of the country after the attack on Sept. 11. The probably that this is only a rumor is pretty low considering the fact that it was dispelled shortly after by Richard Clarke, one of Bush’s former White House aides who wrote a book criticizing Bush and his policies.
Caught in the tragic throes of both Internet and Hollywood fame, Moore seems to be dodging the question of whether or not he considers himself a “journalist,” and even avoiding situations where the question might be posed to him in front of a recording device.
But just as it would be wrong to ignore the fact that Moore does not attempt to disguise his work as unbiased or opinion-free, it would be foolish to sit down in a movie theater and expect what you see to be embellishment free.
And whoever argues that journalism Hollywood film making are mutually exclusive industries should also argue that this is something that had ought to change. It is a sad fact that Moore’s films have probably prompted more conversation among the YouTube generation about government policy than any New York Times article has in the past two decades.
One Google search that will yield vague, scattered results is the phrase “does Michael Moore consider himself a journalist.” In an NPR interview, journalist Bob Edwards interviewed a number of other journalists including MSNBC’s Bill Press (who, with a name like that, had damn well better be a journalist). Press said no, Moore is not a journalist. But what Press really meant by this is that Moore is not a reporter.
MiKE, you can call yourself a journalist in interviews if you really want to- just so long as you throw the words “activist” and “polemicist” in there too. What if Cspan began splicing their coverage with clips from hokey fifties movies, or dubbing audio tracks of smug criticisms over footage of Congressional hearings?
They would lose some of their journalistic credibility and never get it back, just as Moore has.
In the advent of what some call post-2000 journalism, there should be a considerable effort made by everyone not to underestimate the power and value of the blog. But while many fear the downfall of newsprint journalism, they might sometimes forget that the blogs cannot (and should not) exist without the newspapers.
Whatever you want to call Michael Moore, there is one thing you gotta give him as a man with a camera. The guy gets some good footage.
It’s a clever touch, the lone lowercase "i" in the title of Moore’s movie SiCKO. Is it a subliminal allusion to Moore’s potent first-person journalistic style, or a latently rude doffing-of-the-hat to those who criticize him for marinating his video footage in the subtle truculence of his opinion juices?
Probably the former. The truth is, Moore has never doffed his hat to anyone, not even at the Oscars in 2002 when he took the Best Documentary category for Bowling for Columbine.
Moore seemed to have little to say in his defense at the University of Buffalo when a student asked him a question concerning the significant number of viewers who said his work was one-sided and called him a propagandist. His response was that the opinion that plasters work is meant to counterbalance the one-sidedness of outlets such as CNN, who he said are the real propagandists.
SiCKO, Moore’s most recent visual blog, brings up long-pondered philosophical questions; if you’re not telling the whole story, but only part of it, are you lying? What if you’re deliberately leaving pertinent information out? Moore would most likely argue that the importance of saving the world fully outweighs the importance of answering that question.
One can see why so many people are upset with Moore, and why a campaign arose in ‘03 to revoke his 2002 Oscar. His critics (by which we do mean Internet enemies) began finding specific examples to question the extent to which Bowling for Columbine was actually a “documentary.”
A quick Google search will bring up pages upon pages of independent Moore debunkers who post articles pointing out instances of Moore’s glaring lapses in credibility. GunOwners.org, for example, takes issue with specific segments in Bowling for Columbine.
The non-profit site reports that, in a segment that exposes a bank that gives guns as gifts to new account holders, Moore arranged the scene so that he would receive the gun on-site, when in fact the guns had to be picked up at a different location.
In the movie, Moore asked the woman, “don’t you think it’s dangerous to be handing out guns in a bank?”
Then they cite an interview in which Jan Jacobson, the woman who worked at the bank and appeared in the movie giving Moore the gun. Jacobson reportedly said (after seeing the movie) that Moore tricked her into doing the interview by saying he was an NRA member from Michigan. Jacobson went on to say that Moore’s editing team chose to leave out the hour-long process that went into distributing the guns, portraying her as “some backwoods idiot, mindlessly handing out guns.”
Even more frightening than the fact that Moore doesn’t seem to realize that documentaries should be theater-free expositions of reality is the fact that Moore, who was named one of the world’s most influential people by TIME magazine in 2005, is guilty of one of the five requisite elements of libel- a lack of thorough reporting.
In SiCKO, which dropped in late 2007, Moore moseys through countries that have government-run health care systems, dryly but incredulously asking medical employees “so, I don’t have to pay any money for this?”
The common criticism of SiCKO is that Moore either neglected or was careless in giving light to the many problems that these other countries currently face with their public health care systems.
The first and perhaps most relevant comparison he makes to America’s private health system is that of Canada. Moore is right on when he describes the greed and corruption that has become a part of America’s under-regulated, profit-driven HMOs. The people and stories in the film are real and in many cases heartbreaking, and any humane person would agree after viewing that something is wrong here.
However, another Google search will deliver serious talking points regarding the question of the financial sustainability of Canada’s health program. In February of 2006, The New York Times published an article entitled “As Canada's Slow-Motion Public Health System Falters, Private Medical Care Is Surging.”
The article exposed the growing popularity of private health insurance companies and clinics across Canada as the public health service was becoming increasingly overburdened. They cited a study that showed that average waiting period between a referral by a family doctor and an appointment with a specialist had increased to 8.3 weeks in 2005 from 3.7 weeks in 1993.
Not to mention the fact that it doesn’t take a whole lot of research to realize that the happy Canadians interviewed in the hospitals are mostly emergency room patients, and not those who require major surgeries for chronic illness.
If SiCKO came out in late 2007, and the article was published in early 2006, Moore should have to feel the wrath of the blogosphere for putting his name on an obviously one-sided (albeit extremely entertaining), dismally uninformed report.
It’s also worth noting that Moore’s work has undoubtedly teetered on the brink of conspiracy theorem. In Fahrenheit 911, Moore accused President Bush of protecting immediate members of the Bin Laden family by quietly expediting them out of the country after the attack on Sept. 11. The probably that this is only a rumor is pretty low considering the fact that it was dispelled shortly after by Richard Clarke, one of Bush’s former White House aides who wrote a book criticizing Bush and his policies.
Caught in the tragic throes of both Internet and Hollywood fame, Moore seems to be dodging the question of whether or not he considers himself a “journalist,” and even avoiding situations where the question might be posed to him in front of a recording device.
But just as it would be wrong to ignore the fact that Moore does not attempt to disguise his work as unbiased or opinion-free, it would be foolish to sit down in a movie theater and expect what you see to be embellishment free.
And whoever argues that journalism Hollywood film making are mutually exclusive industries should also argue that this is something that had ought to change. It is a sad fact that Moore’s films have probably prompted more conversation among the YouTube generation about government policy than any New York Times article has in the past two decades.
One Google search that will yield vague, scattered results is the phrase “does Michael Moore consider himself a journalist.” In an NPR interview, journalist Bob Edwards interviewed a number of other journalists including MSNBC’s Bill Press (who, with a name like that, had damn well better be a journalist). Press said no, Moore is not a journalist. But what Press really meant by this is that Moore is not a reporter.
MiKE, you can call yourself a journalist in interviews if you really want to- just so long as you throw the words “activist” and “polemicist” in there too. What if Cspan began splicing their coverage with clips from hokey fifties movies, or dubbing audio tracks of smug criticisms over footage of Congressional hearings?
They would lose some of their journalistic credibility and never get it back, just as Moore has.
In the advent of what some call post-2000 journalism, there should be a considerable effort made by everyone not to underestimate the power and value of the blog. But while many fear the downfall of newsprint journalism, they might sometimes forget that the blogs cannot (and should not) exist without the newspapers.
Whatever you want to call Michael Moore, there is one thing you gotta give him as a man with a camera. The guy gets some good footage.
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