Damn Bricker, even the guy you linked to refers to O’Keefe as a journalist.
Please. Even if O’Keefe somewhere, sometime produced a “documentary”, or intends to produce some in the future, are you now going to argue that his ACORN piece was one such? It certainly wasn’t embraced by the right wing as anything less than absolute, unequivocal truth. Journalistic truth.
Moore in your own cite suggests that anyone who disagrees with his synopsis of the Heston speech is invited to read the entirety of it. He doesn’t attempt to hide contradictory evidence. Now, on actually reading that transcript, one may or may not come to the same conclusions that Moore came to. But again, that is inherent in documentary work. Not though in journalism. Journalism isn’t supposed to be about synopsizing to reinforce an opinion.
Really, this is getting thinner and thinner.
Still, friend Bricker has succeeded in dragging us off to talk about Mike Moore as though he were somehow relevant, a your cock diversion brought to fruition by sheer dogged persistence. There is something admirable about such relentless insistence. Annoying, yes, but admirable.
You know who else dragged conversations off topic?
Hi…
Michael Moore!
Annoying, yes. But annoying.
ETA-- but perhaps not nearly as annoying as any discussion of *my *cock…
Yeah, but Michael Moore is annoying too.
You know who else was annoying?
You’re wasting your time, people. The guy will go on for as long as it takes to avoid admitting, especially to himself, that he’s “lost” a discussion. No matter how obvious and pathetic it may be.
Oh, I don’t know, he doesn’t seem to be following up the line of inquiry he opened in the McChrystal thread very fervently.
Are you freakin’ kidding me?
This concept that there’s a “journalism” stamp and a “documentary” stamp that goes on finished videos, and that it’s uncontroverted that Moore uses one and O’Keefe the other is absolutely absurd.
I also reject the twin strawman that the credulous right embraced every inch of film shot by O’Keefe as gospel truth, while simultaneously the wise left discounted the more outlandish of Moore’s claims but accepted that precise quanta of truth left in the Moore piece once the slight exaggerations had been removed.
In short – who are you kidding?
And yet the only “condemnation” of O’Keefe you found was an aside in a piece that was largely about bashing everyone else anyway- and not even over the ACORN thing.
This is one of these shit tactics that really irritates me. It will take me a fair amount of time to track down definitive comments that I know I’ve read, but that aren’t exactly susceptible to specific Google search terms. (What phrase should I Google, whne there are a million ways of conveying the sentiment?)
And if I do… then, what? It’s not like this point proves my case, does it? If I find four conservative bloggers or commentators that provided a pro forma, insincere condemnation, are you going to say, “All right, well played! I concede your entire argument, sir!”
Well, gee, Bricker…
You got 31 House Republicans signing on for a resolution honoring the splendid Mr. O’Keefe, and I quote:
Well, now, which is it? Did they regard the “fact-finding reporting” as “journalism”? Did they regard it as truthful and factual, and thus an honorable venture? Worthy of such an honor as a House of Representative resolution?
Surely you are not going to suggest that they had their doubts about the truthfulness of these “investigations”? That they were such cynics as to seize upon suspicious evidence to advance their agenda and destroy ACORN? Gasp! Me golden idol of civic virtue and stern rectitude is tarnished!
So, who is kidding whom, here?
How many votes does it take to win an Academy Award?
Normally I have a good deal of respect for you and respond to you in a polite and well-reasoned fashion (and will do so shortly to your longer post above), but this seems to be PRECISELY the kind of distraction that people are yelling at you about in this thread.
So you claimed that Republicans had condemned O’Keefe, others asked for a cite, you provided one, others questioned it, yada yada yada. A bit nasty in tone, maybe, but basically standard SDMB debating. And then all of a sudden you answer a comment with what is very clearly intended to mean “well, Hollywood people (who we all know are liberals) gave Moore an academy award”.
How is that even remotely relevant in any conceivable way other than “hey, look, you guys did something similar too! look over there!”?
And what comment did I answer?
“31 Republicans voted to honor O’Keefe for his ACORN work.”
Why was that comment made?
To rebut my rejection of the “right wing credulously accepted O’keefe; left wing skeptically analyzed Moore.”
Correct?
Obviously I’m on the same basic side of the argument as you, but I’m not really sure I agree with this. Certainly documentaries and investigate news journalism have large differences in acceptable tone, how “objective” they are supposed to be, etc. But the basic standards of honesty should still be maintained.
If there were a segment in F911 in which Moore went into NRA offices in the south asking where he could find some Mexicans to shoot with his big awesome gun; and he tried this in lots of different NRA offices until he found one where someone played along with his crazy, plus we couldn’t actually see the footage so we didn’t really know what he said or what he was dressed like or anything but it sure was made to LOOK like an NRA office employee was happily going along with his discussion of where to shoot Mexicans; and if he made no mention of any of the above other than putting the finished edited product in his movie and claimed it was accurate; then I think it would be more or less equally objectionable as the O’Keefe pimp thing.
No, I’m not freakin’ kidding you or anybody. But you keep hanging on to your freakin’ ridiculous false equivalence between feature length movies produced with an unabashedly editorial position by Moore, and the slimy tricks and pure invention offered up by O’Keefe as investigative journalism.
As for the right’s embrace of this bullshit, I doubt there was any credulity involved. O’Keefe produced a targeted hit piece and, with hardly a glance let alone a hesitation, the right began repeating and sensationalizing the story, presenting it as straight news, and competing to outdo each other for the highest level of shrill outrage. No Moore film in his entire catalog has brought out anything like this perfect storm of created hysteria and condemnation.
The wise left hasn’t swallowed Moore’s various (pick a movie, any movie) editorials outright, nor has it scraped off a crust of exaggeration and blindly consumed the rest. The left isn’t a hive mind, and viewers of Moore’s work (like posters here) have varying levels of agreement, and differing levels of respect for Moore. None of them though exhibit the obviously contrived and overheated reactions the right displayed to O’Keefe’s hatchet job on ACORN.
And regardless, all this shit is still just your fucking hijack, a diversionary tactic more cogent and more successful than the drive by nonsense characteristic of some other posters (I could name names, but I’d only be inviting further hijacks) but not actually different in essence.
The OP was about O’Keefe’s more recent foray into investigative journalism, resulting in is arrest, but you’ve managed to make us forget that. Well played!
Uhh, now I’m totally lost… and frankly don’t really care. I’ll just withdraw my last comment as irrelevant to the main discussion going on.
Well, he has a point, if we accept that the right knew for sure that O’Keefe was a lying little scumbag but cynically exploited an opportunity to rid themselves of a political enemy. Which certainly wouldn’t make them credulous and easily duped, so he would win that point.
Slimy, devious, and steeped in evil, sure, but not gullible!
I too think we are quite closely aligned here. I believe it could be argued that Moore does adhere to some “basic standards of honesty”, at least within the historical bounds of the genre within which he works. Note that this includes much that is purely propaganda, some of which (consider particularly some wartime works, or more recently some eco-activist work) contains what Huck Finn would call “stretchers”. Those are things about which reasonable people may disagree.
If Moore had done what you describe in your second paragraph, then **Bricker **might have a valid point. But he (Moore) didn’t and he (Bricker) doesn’t.