Michael Moore controversies

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article's use of the terms Criticism or Controversy in its title may mean the article does not present a neutral point of view of the subject. It may be better to use a different term which offers a broader perspective.

This article may contain improper references to self-published sources. Please help improve it by removing references to unreliable sources where they are used inappropriately. (April 2009)

Film director Michael Moore has been at the center of several controversies, mostly as a result of his liberal political views and/or directing style.

Contents 1 Roger & Me 2 Bowling for Columbine 2.1 Michael Wilson 2.2 Dave Kopel 2.3 Matt Stone and Trey Parker 3 Fahrenheit 9/11 4 Sicko 5 Critical documentary films 6 Hurricane Gustav comments 7 References

[edit] Roger & Me

Moore's body of work has attracted criticism from both the right and the left. On March 12 2007, Canadian filmmakers Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine appeared on MSNBC's Tucker to talk about their documentary Manufacturing Dissent, which investigates Michael Moore. They reported to have found that Moore talked with General Motors Chairman Roger Smith at a company shareholders' meeting, and that this interview was cut from Roger & Me.^[1][2] Moore acknowledged having spoken with Smith after surprising him at a shareholders' meeting in 1987, but said the encounter concerned a separate topic unrelated to the film.^[3] The filmmaker told the Associated Press that had Roger Smith agreed to be interviewed during production, only for him to ignore the footage, General Motors would have publicized the information to discredit him. "I'm so used to listening to the stuff people say about me, it just becomes entertainment for me at this point. It's a fictional character that's been created with the name of Michael Moore."^[3]

[edit] Bowling for Columbine

[edit] Michael Wilson

In Michael Wilson's refutative documentary Michael Moore Hates America, bank employees from the branch at which Moore is given a free hunting rifle assert that they were misled during the filming of this segment. They say that the bank's policy was to conduct background checks on rifle recipients and mail the rifles to a licensed gun dealer, but Moore's agents, under the pretext of "doing a story on unique businesses across America," are accused of convincing bank employees to have his rifle presented to him on camera the morning after filming his account opening. Further, they counter that contrary to the film's supposition that the bank kept hundreds of guns on their premises, the gun which was handed to Michael in the film was shipped overnight from a vault in their Upper Peninsula branch "300 miles away." Moore emphatically denies that this sequence was staged but acknowledges the timing was compressed for production reasons. He reminds his readers that North Country Bank is a licensed firearms dealer, and in addition to its ATF license number, he produces out-takes where bank employee Jan Jacobson appears to confirm on camera that rifles are secured locally on bank premises.^[4][5]

[edit] Dave Kopel

Dave Kopel accused Moore of deceptive editing, staging or scripting scenes, or altering the original intent of the speaker, in his film Bowling for Columbine, in the conservative magazine National Review.^[6] Among other allegations, Kopel said that on-screen text was altered in a Bush-Quayle campaign ad, and footage edited into it from a non-campaign ad in order to make it seem racist. Moore denied that this was done in the film, but corrected the text for the DVD release, so that it mirrored actual events.

[edit] Matt Stone and Trey Parker

In Bowling for Columbine Moore interviewed Matt Stone, who discussed his experiences growing up in the Littleton area and the social alienation that might have contributed to the Columbine High School massacre. Stone, who is a gun-owner himself, said that Moore's presentation of their interview was fair, but he criticized the director for a short animated segment that followed the interview. The cartoon, which is about the history of guns in the United States, implies that there is a connection between the Ku Klux Klan and the National Rifle Association. Stone criticized Moore for making the cartoon "very South Park-esque" and argued that Moore deliberately sought to give viewers the incorrect impression that he and Trey Parker had produced the animation. Parker, the co-creator of South Park, alleged that Moore "ripped off" a film he had once made while at college, named American History, and "put it right after Matt's interview to make it look like we did it".^[7] The cartoon segment does not appear immediately after the Stone interview.^[8] Parker called it "a good reference to what Michael Moore does in films...he creates meaning where there is none by cutting things together."^[9]

[edit] Fahrenheit 9/11

Moore set up a rebuttal "war room" to support the content in Fahrenheit 9/11 and counter critics who asserted he had been deceptive.^[10]

Ray Bradbury has criticized Moore's adaptation of his Fahrenheit 451 title without permission.^[11]

In May 2006, Moore was unsuccessfully sued by a veteran who lost both arms in the war in Iraq. Sergeant Peter Damon, of Middleborough, MA, alleged that Moore used snippets of a television interview without his permission to falsely portray him as anti-war.^[12] A U.S. District Court Judge dismissed the suit on December 21, 2006, finding that no political beliefs were attributed to Damon in the film.^[13] On March 21, 2008 the First Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed the ruling in Moore's favor.^[14] The Associated Press reported that, in reaction to the ruling, "Moore said years of failed lawsuits against his films show his movies are accurate."^[15]

Moore's work has come under fire from those who assert that when making his films, he allegedly edits and re-sequences events in order to twist or misrepresent the words of his targets or interviewees. Dave Kopel catalogues Moore's alleged use of such tactics in Fahrenheit 9/11, and includes the official responses issued by Moore's "war room".^[16] Slate magazine's Christopher Hitchens also wrote a widely circulated critique of the same film.^[17] These criticisms drew several counter-criticisms^[18] as well as an eFilmCritic article^[19] and a Columbus Free Press editorial.^[20]

[edit] Sicko

See also: Sanjay Gupta

Wikinews has related news: Michael Moore's new film 'Sicko' leaked via P2P

Although Sicko was scheduled to be released on June 29, 2007, the film was leaked onto the Internet in June 2007.^[21] Moore, who previously expressed his support for Internet downloading, denies leaking the video himself and an investigation has been held as to the source of the Internet leak.^[22]

In a May 2, 2007 letter, the Office of Foreign Assets Control informed Moore that he was the subject of a civil investigation stemming from the filmmaker's March trip to Cuba. In the letter to Moore, a Treasury official noted that the department had no record of Moore obtaining a license that authorized him to "engage in travel-related transactions involving Cuba," alleging that Moore violated the United States embargo against Cuba.^[23][24] A duplicate master copy of the film was sent to Canada in case American authorities attempted to seize the film as part of the criminal investigation against Moore that arose from taking American 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba for medical treatment.^[25]

Moore appeared several times on CNN in July 2007. On Wolf Blitzer's The Situation Room, following a Sicko fact-checking segment by CNN senior medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, Moore chastised CNN, Gupta, and Blitzer for coverage of his films Sicko and Fahrenheit 9/11. Moore alleged that Sanjay Gupta misrepresented aspects of his film, Sicko, in the fact-checking segment. "He said the facts were fudged," said Moore, referring to Gupta, on CNN's Larry King Live. "That's a lie. None of the facts are fudged." Gupta said that he agreed with Moore on his premise that the U.S. healthcare system is "broken", but questioned Moore's "cherry-picking" of facts.^[26] Moore responded to CNN by publishing the results on his homepage.^[27] In the Blitzer interview, Moore said "I wish that CNN and the other mainstream media would just for once tell the truth about what's going on in this country, whatever it is. You guys have such a poor track record." Later in the interview, he criticized Blitzer and the mainstream media in general for "refusing to ask the hard questions and demand the honest answers," referencing the media's lack of inquiry in the months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.^[28]

Cuban Health Care System

Moore was criticized by John Stossel for allegedly painting a "utopian" picture of the Cuban government and its health care system. Appearing on the ABC News program Nightline in June 2007, Moore responded: "In my movie you see Cubans getting help whenever they get sick, and that is the truth. The U.N. supports that fact. They have an excellent health care system, probably the best in the Third World." In a 20/20 report Stossel contended that typical Cubans citizens receive poor health care, and only richer ones who can pay for the care shown in Sicko receive it. Moore cited a United Nations report that contradicted this. Stossel also presented testimonials that lower Cuban infant mortality rates are due to pregnant women receiving abortions if the fetus shows any sign of problems, and that infants who die hours after birth are not recorded in mortality rates. When Moore claimed the CIA corroborated his assertions, Stossel responded that the CIA denied this, and that their data contradict Moore's assertion.^[29]

In an interview with the Miami Herald, to Dr. Julio Cesar Alfonso, who practiced medicine in Cuba from 1995-1999, claimed that the Cuban healthcare system is far less effective than Moore depicts in his film. Alfonso claimed that needles are commonly reused and that the X-ray machine at Cardenas Regional Hospital is over 40 years old. Alfonso argued that the treatment for the rescue works depicted in the film "was done specifically for them, because they knew it would make great propaganda." He stated that medical centers in Cuba that treat tourists and government officials are considerably better than those treating the general population. He also claimed that Cuban citizens that need prescription drugs are either told to ask relatives in the United States to ship it to them or to use alternative herbal remedies.^[30]

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Cuban American Republican Congresswoman representing Miami, Florida, sharply criticized Moore's film. She stated that the American healthcare system "needs to be fixed and improved" but that it is "just preposterous" to compare it to the Cuban health care system. Ros-Lehtinen argued that the medical attention the 9/11 rescue workers receive in the film is an example of the island's "apartheid healthcare system" and that Cuba provides health care to tourists for the purposes of "propaganda to create goodwill around the world. But that is completely different from the kind of care everyday citizens get."^[30]

In response to criticism that only well-to-do Cuban citizens receive a decent standard of health care, Michael Moore adduced on his website the result of an independent Gallup Poll in which "a near unanimous 96 percent of respondents say that health care in Cuba is accessible to everyone".^[31][32]

[edit] Critical documentary films

A number of documentary films have been produced that criticize Moore, such as Michael Moore Hates America, Celsius 41.11, Michael & Me, FahrenHYPE 9/11, and Manufacturing Dissent. He is also satirized in the 2008 fictional film An American Carol. The filmmaker has joked that he will one day "sponsor a film festival of anti-Michael Moore films", personally handing out a prize to the winner.^[33]

[edit] Hurricane Gustav comments

As Hurricane Gustav approached the Gulf Coast as a Category 3/4 hurricane, Moore told MSNBC host Keith Olbermann on August 29, 2008 that the hurricane is "proof that there is a God in heaven,"^[34] since it would be hitting land on the same day as the start of the Republican National Convention. He further said it is proof of God "to just have it planned at the same time, that it would actually be on its way to New Orleans for day one of the Republican convention, up in the Twin Cities, at the top of the Mississippi River."^[34] He also added, "I mean, I certainly hope nobody gets hurt. I hope everybody's taking cover."^[34] Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise demanded an apology from Moore, calling the remarks offensive and inappropriate, adding, "the God I know would not share Michael Moore's glee for our plight."^[34] On August 31, Moore posted a satirical letter to God on his website, thanking Him for the timing of the storm but asking him to let it die at sea so it would do no serious damage.^[35] Two days later, Moore said of his Gustav comments on his website, "Never explain comedy or satire or the ironic comment. Those who get it, get it. Those who don't, never will."^[36]

[edit] References