Mark Thomas is the closest thing the UK has.
http://www.channel4.com/news/microsites/M/mark_thomas/
The Brits and most of Europe from my experience save the “he hates place name of country here” crap to people who actually do hate the country. Not people who criticise the system/admins etc.
Moore is unquestionably dishonest. He
Tends to repeat urban legends as fact if they fit his preconceptions, such as the “banned song” bit, or the time he was sent a Photoshopped picture of the WTC attacks with an F-16 painted in,
Lies by omission, and
As in the San Diego book signing incident, sometimes just lies.
So does that make his films worthless, or him worthless? I don’t think so. The central point of “BfC” is still an insightful and valuable one. “Roger & Me” is still one of the most original and poignant documentaries ever filmed. And he IS raising some valuable points. Like any other source you just have to apply critical thinking so you can take what’s true from it.
What I find almost hilariously, unconsciously stupid is that anyone would start off a criticism of Moore by saying he “hates America.” I mean, aside from the fact that he obviously does not hate America, surely the author realizes that he’s parroting the joke stereotype of the fascist? “Why do you hate America so much? Blarrrrrrgh!”
Well, the distribution brouhaha over Farenheit 911 may classify as a lie, or at least a flagrant publicity stunt, depending on who you believe.
Far too many conflicting sites/cites to summarize them all, but here’s one discussion on metafilter ( http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/32958)
The story seems to be that Michael Moore announced with tears of outrage that he had learned in 2004 that Disney would not release the film. Later, it came out that he had been told a year earlier that Disney was not happy with the direction of the film and wanted out. Michael later denied this (http://www.dtheatre.com/read.php?sid=2377). Or at least claimed that the continued flow of Disney money led him to believe that Disney would distribute the film.
My thought – there’s a lot of “he said, they said” for a business deal, and not a lot of signed documents saying “Yes, we will distribute your film, oops, no we won’t.” But Michael Moore is no naif – he’s produced films before. So his protestations of dewey-eyed innocence don’t ring true with me.
If one website for a cite is not enough, try www.spinsanity.org. Use their search function, and type in “Bowling For Columbine.” You will find enough material to keep you amused for quite some time.
In the film, it was flatly stated that you got a gun for opening an account. I find that to be a different statement than “you get a gun for opening a CD, and you may accrue your interest in the form of a premium, and one of the premiums we offer is a firearm, and even then we do extensive background checks, and you gotta come back later and get the gun.”
When President Bush puts this kind of English on the facts in order to make it play a certain way in Peoria, I call it “lying.” I see no reason to call it anything else just because Michael Moore is the one doing it.
There is also the matter of whether or not Canadians lock their doors. Moore wandered up and down a street in Canada, trying people’s front doors. None seemed to be locked. Moore’s point seemed to be that Canada has a sane attitude about guns, most people don’t own them, and therefore, Canadians feel safer and ARE safer, and leave their doors unlocked all the time.
What was SAW was this: Moore wandered up to a few houses and tried the front doors. None were locked, and on each occasion, there seemed to be people inside the houses; he didn’t seem to try any empty houses.
…well, duh. I live in Texas, where we have more guns per square acre than half of Europe, and while I sit here typing in my den, my front door is unlocked. So are those of my neighbors – the ones who are home, at least. Admittedly, this is Texas, so if Michael Moore were to pop up on my front stoop with a camera crew and see if the front door was unlocked, I’d likely have some harsh words for him… but I doubt I’d be inclined to run for my bazooka, if he showed the same demeanor he did in the film.
(although after I got through with him, I find it unlikely that I’d end up in his movie)
So: It’s either “Canadians don’t lock their doors, because they have sane gun laws and they feel safe,” or “Canadians don’t bother locking the front door when they’re at home.” Which did Michael Moore express in “Bowling for Columbine?”
The crime of it is, Michael Moore does in fact have some great things to say, some fine points to make. We are ruled by corrupt men. Unfortunately, Moore makes his points in a manner that hurts his own credibility. Seems to me that if you’re going to catch the President or a right-wing pundit or a right-wing icon in a lie, or a misstatement, or whatever, you could do it lively and entertaining… without having to put your own spin on it. What, the truth isn’t enough in America these days? Even Al Franken does his research and states the freakin’ truth, and Al Franken’s a flippin’ comedian.
I began disliking Michael Moore during his television days, when he began ambushing people with microphones.
Y’see, this is an old technique; *60 Minutes * still does it with great success. However, *60 Minutes * generally restricts their targets to “people who know damn good and well why *60 Minutes * is after them.”
His ambush of Dick Clark in “Bowling for Columbine,” on the other hand, was an attempt to make Dick Clark look bad; there is some question as to whether Clark had any idea what Moore was yammering about. It was successful, for the most part; Dick Clark didn’t want to talk to this fat man with the microphone, and he got in his vehicle and took off… much as any of YOU would if I suddenly got in your face, and began screaming, “TELL MY VIEWERS ABOUT THE MURDERED CHILDREN OF BIAFRA, QADGOP THE MERCOTAN!!! SO, YOU DENY YOU WERE A GUARD AT AUSCHWITZ, DEWEY CHEATEM UNDHOW?”
…and then there’s that circus he pulled at the end of the movie, where he maneuvered his way into an interview with Charlton Heston, in the man’s home, and then launched his ambush interview. Did Moore have a point? Yeah; the NRA was in fact guilty of its own spin doctoring, re: the Columbine incident. But while making it clear that he had a point, he also made it clear that it’s okay to lie, cheat, and steal to MAKE your point. The end justifies the means. And that’s wrong.
Oh, yeah… and that “ballistic missile factory,” I’m told, doesn’t make ballistic missiles. It makes boosters for launching satellites, although they may have made ballistic missile parts at one point, waaaay before the Columbine incident.
After checking the facts on “Bowling for Columbine,” I felt kind of trapped between two opposing viewpoints – the left wing and the right wing – and I knew, somehow, that both sides would gleefully lie, cheat, and steal to get me to believe in THEIR agenda, and no other.
America is screwed.
Thanks, Michael Moore. I feel a whole lot better now.
I haven’t seen BfC, but I’m hardly convinced that it’s a bonfire of lies based on this flimsy thread.
No one is saying they’re giving them out without background checks; apparently he can be seen on screen filling out the appropriate legal forms. No one is saying that the bank is spitting out guns all over the street like the giant floating head in Zardoz. He isn’t the only person who got a gun. So what’s the fuss if you get the gun for being in building A instead of being in building B? What’s the fuss if you get it for doing X instead of Y? Assuming that all the facts presented by the anti-Moore camp are true, so what? He got the gun for being a bank customer, no?
Oh, yeah, that’s completely different. :rolleyes:
This is how Michael Moore works
Michael Moore has Blair in his sights. - June 12th 2004
Sorry to Scare You, Tony: Michael Moore Was Just Joking June 13th 2004
If he says something that turns out to be a lie, he turns around and says “it was a joke”. Sad, really.
I used to love Michael Moore back in the days of Roger & Me and The Awful Truth. He used to make interesting shows with some insight into the way BigBusiness/GovernmentCronies worked, but almost everything he’s done recently has veered into self parody.
He included non-factual aspects to the story in order to make the bank look more irresponsible and provoke a negative response from his audience. If the bank is irresponsible, show them in the harsh light of reality, that will tell us all we need to know.
Yeah, actually, it is, whether or not you roll your eyes.
In the one case, and as MM claimed, you’ve got top-down censorship of broadcasting on stations across the country, and that’s pretty icky.
What really happened is that a lot of the people responsible for choosing the programming for their own stations starting kicking back and forth, via email, a list of songs that they might want to avoid right after the terrorist attack. Nobody was required to keep these songs off the air, and the central office wasn’t really involved in this list. It was just something that some regional program managers had decided on for themselves and were passing along their thoughts to other program managers.
That might be a little icky, but only because centralized radio control is a little icky. It’s nowhere near the ominous political censorship that MM suggested it was.
Keep in mind that most environmentalists oppose the “protection of the beaches,” since the rollover of barrier islands is a natural process around which the local ecosystems have adapted. Protecting the beaches always involves pretty serious disruption of the barrier island ecosystems. Indeed, it’s usually beachfront property owners who advocate taxpayer-funded beach “protection,” notwithstanding the ugly barriers it entails; without such “protection,” their beachfront property gets blown away in the next hurricane. (Now I’m hearkening back to twelfth-grade oceonography class 
).
Daniel
What the hell? He made a joke in an interview; as soon as he realized people thought he was serious, he clarified that it was a joke.
What do you mean, “says something that turns out to be a lie”? He said something about his intentions that wasn’t true, sure–but what possible motive would he have had on June 12 for getting people to take this statement seriously, that he wouldn’t also have on June 13?
Either he was joking, or else this sequence of events makes no sense at all.
Of COURSE he was joking. This is quite a stretch to call it a lie.
Daniel
Sorry, I don’t find a bunch of mid-level managers deciding to censor on their own initiative substantially different from a bunch of high-level managers telling the mid-level managers to do it.
Does anyone really thing that the bank is more or less irresponsible depending on when you actually get the gun? Is anyone more or less outraged because you get a gun for interest instead of for opening?
The essential point is that he got a gun for being a customer. Whether or not you find that outrageous or irresponsible is up to you, but I seriously doubt your level of outrage or lack thereof will substanitally change as a result of when exactly you get the firearm.
And if they don’t give out guns with new accounts, how did Moore get the gun? Because he asked nicely? Surely then that must be a premium any canny customer can coax out of the bank for a signup, much like you can extort things out of a phone company if you threaten to switch. So still, I fail to see any substantial difference in the two scenarios.
Michael Moore makes documentaries. They can be twisted and full of lies, but they’re still documentaries. Anyone who claims otherwise doesn’t know anything about filmmaking…go watch Herzog’s “Lessons in Darkness,” another documentary, and you’ll realize that, in cinematic terms, documentary filmmaking can’t be reduced to a Ken Burns-style presentation of facts (not that Burns doesn’t manipulate facts, too). Documentaries can range from nuanced and vague to straight-foward and fact-filled. They can be op-eds (like Moore’s films), interviews, or presentations of verifiable information. or they can just be impressions of reality (a la Herzog). They can be a lot of things.
To say Michael Moore’s films aren’t “documentaries” just because they twist or manipulate facts is like claiming whale sharks aren’t sharks because they don’t attack people. You’re defining “documentary” incorrectly.
Getting upset over Moore’s edits is futile - all edits are manipulative. All documentaries use manipulative edits. People who seek objective truth in editing are always going to be manipulated. That’s their fault, not Moore’s.
Also, anyone who tries to have an opinion by not investigating the subject firsthand (eg, not watching Moore’s films), and relying instead on second-hand information is totally incapable of thinking for themselves and not worthy of the opinion they are trying to espouse.
What thread are you reading, Freejooky?
Okay, guys… you’re getting warmer.
moorewatch.com was especially interesting. I think after this thread runs its course I’m going to do my own mini-Mooreathon, starting with BfC and ending with Fahrenheit.
Any suggestions (from supporters AND detractors) on what to see in between?
NB. No, I’m not going to balance things with Rambo.
Brady Bill anyone? You actually think that nobody thought giving the gun on the premises immediately after opening a CD wasn’t worse than getting the gun at a later time/date at a licensed gun dealer?
If the only important fact was that a gun was made available, why bother filming Moore walking out of the bank with a gun?
I suppose, technically, this picture is a lie, too. I mean, what’s shown there has never actually happened.
Moore is trying to do ‘new journalism’ in movie form, i.e. having the reporter take a very active part in the story. My beef with Moore is that he does too much grandstanding. I’m sure F911 will have enough interesting and thought provoking things in it, but when I saw the trailer with Moore driving around a truck with a loudspeaker, reading the patriot act to Capitol Hill, I had to roll my eyes. Pulling stunts like that can only hurt him.
I still can’t understand all the vitriol against Moore. To read these boards and other sites, the impression is of a cook, full of lies, which makes me wonder why he hasn’t been (successfully) sued. Or why he’s so dangerous.
Because he can only be dangerous if he actually has a point to make.
I don’t recall him saying that it was irresponsible. He did ask a bank employee whether they thought it irresponsible - and either didn’t get or didn’t show the answer. He was using the whole incident as a reminder of just how out of synch with the rest of the world the US is in terms of guns.
Months prior to the abuse at the prisons? Would releasing footage prevented the prison abuse? Held back on the story for fear of bad publicity? Or for shock value? Or profit?
The abuse of prisoners was ongoing - just today it’s been announced that several British soldiers are to face courts martial for abuse over a year ago. It was happening, and it kept on happening until it (hopefully) was stopped because of photos becoming public.
