Yeah, but you’re ignoring the essential truth of Moore’s claim: that there are banks that give guns as premiums for purchasing a CD. What forms you have to fill out and when you get the guns is nitpicking.
Michael Moore’s own response to criticism of the ‘bank scene’:
I disagree. I walked out of the movie thinking the bank was just handing out guns. Moore ommitted fundamental facts that made the bank appear far more irresponsible then they actually were. I believe you can lie by not telling the whole truth, and I think that’s what Moore did.
He’s still very amusing and insightful, though.
And before any starts swinging the official SDMB Conservative Bashing Mace at me, I’m very, very liberal.
If the reality is that one has to go off premises to get the gun, then the “essential truth” will be nicely captured by going off premises to get the gun. If the actual situation is really that horrible, or laughable, or wonderful that it deserves inclusion in his film, he shouldn’t need to alter it in any way. He could easily have gone to the bank, then gone to the dealer and told the real story. By altering the normal sequence of events, you alter what your audience will take away from it.
If he wanted to, he could have set up a phony bank altogether. Actors playing all the workers and customers, doing whatever wacky hilbilly stuff Moore wants, then Moore walks out sporting an AK-47, firing it in the air, WAAAAHOOOOOO! The essential truth of getting a gun from a bank would remain, but the entire event would be fictional.
At some point, exaggerating becomes nothing more than lying. When the event you depict is not the typical day to day event, and you pretend it is… you’re lying.
On preview: we have two completely different statements about a single event. We have the bank worker saying that they don’t have guns on premises, and only did this on special request for the movie. We have Moore saying he didn’t ask for anything special. :smack:
In the movie the bank workers says “We have a vault which at all times we keep at least 500 firearms in”
He has continually referred to the annual members’ meeting of the NRA, the one that they are reqiured by law due to their tax status to have, as a ‘rally’ that the NRA flatly refused to cancel.
What was wrong with telling the truth: that legally they couldn’t cancel the meeting, that they cancelled every event other than those required by the law, and that having been planned years in advance it wasn’t possible to move the meeting after the events of Columbine?
Why did he have to lie and call the meeting a rally?
I can give you two examples of things he’s said which were unambiguously false; unfortunately, I can’t give you specific cites on them.
First, after 9/11, he sent out a mailing claiming that Clear Channel Communications (a major US radio-station company) had listed songs that DJs were forbidden to play, such as “Give Peace a Chance,” by John Lennon. This was not true. In this case, I believe he heard this urban legend and ran with it rather than bothering to check it out first.
Second, in Stupid White Men, he explains that North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras Light House is in danger of falling into the ocean due to terrible erosion on the eastern seaboard; he strongly implies (if not outright claims) that this erosion is caused by humans. In actuality, Cape Hatteras is a barrier island, and barrier islands “roll”: that is, there is constant landmass added to the side of the island that faces the sound, and constant landmass eroded from teh side that faces the ocean. If I recall sixth-grade science class correctly (and I may well not), barrier islands can completely roll over just a couple of centuries. The erosion on Cape Hatteras was natural, not human-caused.
I don’t know if Moore knew this was false before he wrote it, but that’s kinda the problem. He needs to check his facts more carefully before publishing them.
Daniel
who may have gotten some details wrong, above, but then who isn’t writing a book, either.
But, that’s what you do when you have an agenda you’re pushing. It’s not a secret that Michael Moore is liberal, and that he’s got a specific political purpose in his filmmaking. You can’t make a two-hour film depict the whole complexity of any situation, and he’s naturally gonna err on the side of putting his point forward. Heck, when I write a paper for a literature class, it’s not as though I raise points that I don’t agree with - it makes for a less compelling argument. The idea is that the other side also argues, and people get to decide who’s done the best job.
When the other side chooses to argue with ad hominem attacks, that weakens their position in my book. Like, for example, the name of the website: michaelmoorehatesamerica.com. Now, that’s a pretty strong charge, and it’s a blatant lie - if you read what he says, or listen to him speak, not only is it clear that he does this in order to protect his country, but he’ll wax pretty rhapsodic on the good things about this place sometimes. I just wish I could find a response that wasn’t the typical adolescent charges that he hates America, motherhood, and apple pie, because if there is something to the idea that he lies, or even stretches the truth a lot, I’d like to know.
As it is, I pretty much have to decide that this is a smear campaign. The right’s got a history of having a well-oiled propaganda machine, and in my view more than once they’ve managed to create public ire and mistrust where it didn’t occur before. It’s kind of depressing, really.
That probably isn’t related to the bank promotion at all.
Many people in the United States keep firearms in bank safety deposit boxes. This is especially done for very valuable guns. Keep in mind that some firearms can be worth tens of thousands of dollars.
This is no different than keeping jewelry there.
I mentioned in another Michael Moore thread a challenge made to his book Stupid White Men by Fred Barnes. Moore quoted a conversation with Barnes in the book, and Barnes is saying the conversation never took place.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/127ujhuf.asp
Now, Fred Barnes is a commentator with strong opinions. But I’ve never heard anyone question his personal integrity or his command of the facts.
Ah, but how would the bank employee know there were no less than 500 guns in safe deposit boxes? Aren’t they supposed to be private? And, if the quote is correct, should one of the box holders remove their gun, does the bank go looking for another box holder to add one to maintain that magic 500 number? Somehow, I don’t believe the bank employee was referring to safe deposit boxes…
To be fair, I didn’t know this information until this very post, and shocked, I read the link you provided carefully. Clear Channel did put out a list, and to me as a peon, there’s little difference between a group of program managers and the corporate office. They both have the authority to censor what I hear. Making the case that Michael Moore is blatantly misrepresenting the facts is a stretch, given that Clear Channel distributed a list of songs. Snopes is taking Clear Channel’s side, but it’s only a semantic victory.
You’re 100% right about Cape Hatteras. However, humans are preventing the protection of the beaches by underfunding prevention and environmental maintenance, and I suspect, by not wanting ocean views marred by ugly barriers. Cape Hatteras, even as famous as it is, had deep problems getting funding to be moved inland. Don’t even get me started on Wrightsville sea turtle nests. I’m sure this isn’t the argument Michael Moore is making, and I’m pretty pissed he’d whore out my state, I’m just speaking as one Carolina geek to another. 
Dagnabbit. I thought I’d covered this and moved on, but Moore still gets my dander up.
Consarn it. (I seem to have a case of Grizzled Old Prospector Syndrome.)
During Bowling for Columbine, in an effort to prove Heston knew about the Flint, Michigan shooting, Moore claims that a bit about the story appeared on “his [Heston’s] own NRA website” - the item in fact appeared on the NRA website, not Heston’s website.
And before you go into grammar-semantics mode and start sputtering things like “well, h-he meant that it’s Heston’s NRA” - don’t be stupid. Heston’s NRA? As opposed to someone else’s?
The sources of his statistics also seem questionable, and when I have an hour to waste sometime, I’ll probably make an effort to firmly prove those wrong as well.
But he doesn’t have a lot of outright lies in Bowling for Columbine - but certain interviews with the filmmaker regarding the content thereof do contain lies. Most of the “untruth” of Bowling for Columbine is omission - which is fine in a biased political documentary, really - and distortion, like catsix’s point about the “rally” and some of the staged shots - which isn’t.
This section of Bowlingfortruth describes the problem, and has a link to the interview containing the falsehood.
Why do you keep bringing that piece of crap website into these threads? Bowling for Truth misrepresents what Moore says and does for its own gain, a crime they level at Moore!
Aha! Thank you for posting, CandidGamera. I’ve been wanting to link to this thread you started, but could not for the life of me remember who started it.
There is some Bowling for Columbine true/false discussion in that thread, some of which is interesting.
Well, you’re a Moore apologist, right? So don’t you think it’s just the message that matters? 
Even a piece of crap website can link to other sites that aren’t crap. And the discussion on BFT about the invisible cameraman problem is more or less accurate, and saves me the trouble of describing it.
Just wanted to chime in with this thread from a couple of years ago:
Michael Moore, you are a hypocritical lying sack of shit
Moore a liar? You betcha, unless you think describing being politely asked to end a book signing qualifies as a “police raid.”
By the way, some of the links in that earlier thread are now dead (curiously, Moore did a Stalinesque deletion of the entry that started the whole thing). There are links to mirrors here.
If Michael Moore were British, and exposed this kind of stuff about the way things are run in Britain, he’d be a national hero.
In America, for exposing hypocrisy, malpractice, corruption etc, he seems to have earnt himself a popularity rating somewhere between Saddam and OBL. Why is this, I wonder? What is it about the national psyche in America that equates “highlighting bad things about the country” with “hating the country”?
No, I;'m not an apologist for Moore. I’m sick of that piece of crap website being referenced like a bastion of truth everytime Moore is mentioned.