Manufacturing Dissent

Manufacturing Dissent
Promotional poster for Manufacturing Dissent
Directed by	Rick Caine Debbie Melnyk
Written by	Rick Caine Debbie Melnyk
Produced by	Rick Caine Debbie Melnyk
Starring	Rick Caine Debbie Melnyk Michael Moore Noam Chomsky Sean Hannity Al Franken Jesse Larner
Release dates	March 10, 2007
Running time	96 min.
Country	Canada
Language	English

Manufacturing Dissent is a 2007 documentary that asserts that filmmaker and polemicist Michael Moore has misleading tactics. The documentary exposes what the creators say are Moore's misleading tactics and mimics Moore's style of small documentary makers seeking and badgering their target for an interview to receive answers to their charges. The film was made over the course of two years by Canadians Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine after they viewed Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore's controversial film attacking the Bush administration and its policies. Melnyk and Caine have stated that when they first sought to make a film about Moore, they held great admiration for what he had done for the documentary genre and set out to make a biography of him. During the course of their research, they became disenchanted with Moore's tactics. The title is a pun on the title of the book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, and the film it inspired, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. In June 2007, Liberation Entertainment Inc. signed an exclusive deal with the filmmakers for all video and theatrical rights in the US & UK.

Criticisms of Moore

While Moore depicted an evasive Roger Smith, then-Chairman of General Motors, in his breakout documentary Roger and Me, Moore spoke with Smith twice. Moore had a lengthy exchange with Smith at a May 1987 GM shareholders meeting yet never included it in his piece. The filmmakers found this shocking as it appeared to negate Moore's central premise of the film that corporate CEOs exploit lower class workers and refuse to answer questions or acknowledge any wrongdoing. Moore counters that the discussion, which occurred before he commenced filming, was not recorded by him. Manufacturing Dissent shows the footage in its entirety.

Another one of their discoveries is that in Moore's Academy Award winning film Bowling for Columbine, Moore misleads the audience in describing the safety Canadians feel in their homes. In the film, Moore goes door-to-door in Sarnia, Ontario testing to see if the front doors are locked or unlocked. Moore edits the film to show every home he tries with an unlocked door. Caine and Melnyk report states that Moore's producer for the segment told them that in reality about 40 percent of the homes had unlocked doors, possibly somewhat discrediting Moore's thesis that Canadians feel safer because guns are more regulated in their country than in the United States.

The film also presents extended footage of the Al Smith annual memorial dinner from which Moore, in Fahrenheit 9/11, took a clip of President George W. Bush greeting the guests as the "haves and have-mores", insinuating that President Bush views the elite upper-class as his constituency, not the average American. The extended footage shows each speaker at the dinner poking fun at himself, including a clip of Al Gore joking that he invented the Internet. The extended footage shows Moore to have taken the quote from President Bush out of context.

Moore's response

In the film the documentary makers were never able to land their sit-down interview with Moore, just as Moore claimed he was unable to have with Roger Smith. Their attempts to interview Moore were consistently dodged and obstructed by Moore and the people surrounding him.

Moore vehemently rejected allegations he successfully managed to interview Roger Smith and then left that footage on the cutting room floor, telling the Associated Press: "Anyone who says that is a fucking liar." The filmmaker accepted having had a "good five minutes of back-and-forth" with Smith after ambushing him at a shareholders' meeting in 1987, but maintained this specific questioning occurred several months before he started making Roger & Me and was not directly connected to the film. "Any exchange with Roger Smith would have been valuable," said Moore, before suggesting that if he truly had landed an interview with Smith during production and then suppressed the footage, General Motors would almost certainly have publicized the event 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."

Moore had previously remained quiet on the matter. His silence is similar to his response (or lack thereof) to other criticisms of his work; this was interpreted by Melnyk as a means by Moore to not draw any attention to the allegations made against him, and to not draw attention to the film itself.

Fox News interview

Melnyk and Caine were invited to appear on a number of Fox News programs to discuss the film. They accepted an invitation to the show The Live Desk, with Martha MacCallum, fearing that their comments would be edited if they appeared on a taped program. When the pair refused to direct their criticism solely at Michael Moore, but also at mainstream U.S. media and George W. Bush, the interview was cut short. Caine told the Canadian Press, "I could hear a person in New York screaming into my earpiece: 'Get that asshole off the air.' They cut us off."

See also

• Michael Moore controversies
• Michael Moore Hates America

External links

• Official site
• Manufacturing Dissent at IMDb
• Template:MySpace
• Exclaim.ca - Sept 2007 interview with Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine