The Wall Street Journal yesterday (just stay away from the noxious editorial page) there was an article from NPRs Scott Simon railing on Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9-11.
We've heard it before, fast and loose on the facts, fueled by innuendo and vaugarees...
I was just amazed that Simon would choose to dress down Moore in the WSJ. Why show the Liberal dirty Laundry in a publication popular with the right?
His points were well taken but I hold him accountable for his tactic for doing it.
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When Punchline Trumps Honesty
There's more McCarthy than Murrow in the work of Michael Moore.
BY SCOTT SIMON
Tuesday, July 27, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
Michael Moore has won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and may win an Oscar for the kind of work that got Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Jack Kelly fired.
Trying to track the unproven innuendoes and conspiracies in a Michael Moore film or book is as futile as trying to count the flatulence jokes in one by Adam Sandler. Some journalists and critics have acted as if his wrenching of facts is no more serious than a movie continuity problem, like showing a 1963 Chevy in 1956 Santa Monica.
A documentary film doesn't have to be fair and balanced, to coin a phrase. But it ought to make an attempt to be accurate. It can certainly be pointed and opinionated. But it should not knowingly misrepresent the truth. Much of Michael Moore's films and books, however entertaining to his fans and enraging to his critics, seems to regard facts as mere nuisances to the story he wants to tell.
Back in 1991 that sharpest of film critics, the New Yorker's Pauline Kael, blunted some of the raves for Mr. Moore's "Roger and Me" by pointing out how the film misrepresented many facts about plant closings in Flint, Mich., and caricatured people it purported to feel for. "The film I saw was shallow and facetious," said Kael, "a piece of gonzo demagoguery that made me feel cheap for laughing."
His methods remain unrefined in "Fahrenheit 9/11." Mr. Moore ignores or misrepresents the truth, prefers innuendo to fact, edits with poetic license rather than accuracy, and strips existing news footage of its context to make events and real people say what he wants, even if they don't. As Kael observed back then, Mr. Moore's method is no more high-minded than "the work of a slick ad exec."
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http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110005402