Tuesday, July 10, 2007

CNN vs. Michael Moore


Quote of the day:
“Whenever it is universally known that power is the creation of its victims, the world trembles.”
--Earl Shorris

When I turned on CNN this morning, my eyebrows were almost burned off by Michael Moore.

They were replaying a bit of Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room from the day before. They had scheduled an interview with Michael Moore and introduced it with a piece by their medical reporter, Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Gupta had called into question a statistic or two from Moore’s movie Sicko. He also said he liked the film. The discrepancies Gupta were pointing out were small, but he said Moore had “fudged” some numbers.

That’s what lit Moore’s fuse. What ensued was both entertaining and quite constructive.

The other criticism was that Moore did not report any of the problems or the costs of the French, Canadian and British systems, all of which he praised. His response to this was that, in his memory, there had been nothing but criticism of these systems in the American press for the last ten years or longer.

I think Moore makes an excellent point there. Of course there are problems with the French, Canadian and British systems. Can you remember seeing anything positive about them in the press? I can’t.

The salient point for the average American is that, in these countries, health care is free and accessible to all. That’s what Moore portrays. As citizens of each of these nations talk about what it’s like going to the doctor, they actually seem calm and satisfied. Can you imagine?

We are so conditioned to working our own system, it’s hard for us to imagine not having to do that anymore.

The most-important thing to come out of the Michael Moore-CNN fracas is not about health care. It’s about the role of the media.

Moore took Wolf Blitzer and CNN to task for failing to be more aggressive in reporting about Iraq as well as health care. He also was still mad about their criticism of his previous film Fahrenheit 911. He said, correctly, that the facts he presented in that film have not been disputed, and that his conclusions have turned out to be true. And he asked for an apology, which didn’t come.

Moore is right to criticize. News organizations such as CNN have become accustomed to simply repeating facts that are shoved their way by self-interested organizations, including the U.S. government and think tanks sponsored by the health-insurance industry.

They no longer are able or willing to investigate or even question, and certainly not with any depth. So it is left to Michael Moore, with all his obnoxious self-righteousness, to present something other than the “company line.”

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