Talk:Dave Kopel

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[edit] Kopel's list of F911's "56 deceits"

A member of a mailing list I am on directed our attention to Kopel's list just over a year ago. I was pretty disgusted with Kopel, when I read it, because I found his list itself highly deceitful.

I wrote to Kopel a civil email where I challenged him on several of his points. I sent a carbon to the Kopel fan who had told us about Kopel's list. Kopel didn't reply. Okay, he was a busy guy. But he didn't alter the site either.

I checked, regularly, for a month or so. The points I challenged Kopel remained on the list. Three of four months later they had quietly been dropped from the list. But there was no change log -- no list of the points he had tried to make that had been demonstrated to be false. Kopel made serious accusations against Moore. And when he was no longer prepared to stand behind them he should have acknowledged his errors. He didn't. I think he should have apologized. He didn't.

Whether the accuracy of Moore's film stands up to journalistic standards is not important when we discuss Kopel's accuracy. Kopel represents himself as a journalist. He represented his list as journalism. So I expect him measure up to the standards of journalism. He doesn't.

This is why I changed the wording of the article from "He is a leading critic of Michael Moore and documents extensively Moore's fabricated claims" to "He is a leading critic of Michael Moore and provided a list of what he characterized as Moore's "deceits"". -- Geo Swan 21:41, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, what were those deceits? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 202.183.109.9 (talk • contribs). 08:08, 2006 June 4

He/she will never tell you what were those deceits. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.61.176.163 (talk • contribs). 20:16, 2006 October 15

Why can't you just accept that Moore himself has admitted that his film was art, not factual, and that it wasn't very truthful? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 203.166.99.246 (talk • contribs). 22:06, 2006 October 19

[edit] What were Kopel's deceits?

My email to Kopel, circa Spring or Summer 2004 asked three questions about the deciets he was then number 53, 57a, 36.

• In "Deceit 53", at that point claimed Moore lied about the number of Congressional children serving in Iraq. Kopel claimed that Moore asserted only one Congressional child was serving in Iraq. Wrong. Moore said only one Congressperson had a child serving in the enlisted ranks in Iraq. Kopel disproof included a bunch of officers, including USN officers safely floating on vessels in the Persian Gulf. And he included a child of a Cabinet member -- when they aren't Congressmen.
• In "Deceit 57", Kopel originally had one of his poinnts address the dispute over whether the movie was going to use the song, "Won't get fooled again." The story was complicated. And Kopel got it completely backwards. In Kopel's version the songwriter, Pete Townshend, or his agents, had approached Moore, and asked Moore to use the song, that Moore refused, and then lied about it. That is completely backwards. Moore asked for permission to use the song. Townshend refused, because he didn't like Moore's earlier work. Absolutely no one, except Kopel, claimed Moore lied about the use of the song in the film. Kopel's claim that Moore lied, in this instance, seems to have been based on a lazy, careless, desperated search to twist every aspect of the film into a "deceit".
• In "Deceit 36" Kopel claimed it was a deceit for Moore to assert that "Ashcroft lost to a dead guy". Although I am a Canadian I watch US public affairs shows, like "The McGlaughlin Group". I had heard the joke "Ashcroft lost to a dead guy" at least a dozen times before Moore's film came out. This is another instance of Kopel's desperate and intellectually dishonest attempt to distort the extent to which Moore's film falls short of honesty.

If Moore doesn't claim to have been working as a journalist in that film, but Kopel does claim to be practicing journalism with his 59 deceits, then Kopel has a higher standard he should try to meet.

In particular, if Kopel was intellectually honest, he would have had a change log, acknowledging when he made changes to the deceit list when it was brought to his attention that his list contained errors.

Two more instances of Kopels desperate and intellectually dishonest attempts to falsely present Moore as dishonest are his claim that Moore unfairly took Condaleeza Rice's comment out of context, and his claim that Moore was not really from Flint.

Kopel originally got his knickers in a twist claiming Moore quoted Condaleeza Rice out of context, in a way that distorted what she was saying, unfairly making her look inconsistent and ridiculous. The quote he took from her speech was on record. I went to it -- waiting to see whether if Moore had supplied the full context it would have made her look any less ridiculous and inconsistent. Nope. When you read the full context of the quoted remark she doesn't look any less ridiculous and inconsistent. In the rest of that paragraph she wanders around, restating several contradictions. Around that time I heard a self-important Republican spin-doctor on PBS. If you remember "Wag the Dog" he broke the rule that triggered the Robert Deniro character to have the Dustin Hoffman character -- the producer, whacked. He bragged about his advice to Republicans. His advice? You can't mention 9-11 too often. Every policy speech on the War on Iraq should start with a mention of 9-11, and should return to 9-11 as often as possible -- without regard to whether it really has anything to do with 9-11. IMO Rice was following this advice.

Kopel quibbled whether Moore was really from Flint, when he really grew up in a town near Flint. I grew up in Toronto. When I was born Toronto had a Metropolitan government, the city core, with a population of 500,000 had a local government, and neighbouring municipalities had their own municipal governments. But there was a metropolitan government on top of that, that covered Police Services, Sewers, main roads, Transit. The junior municipalities covered schools, local roads, and some other services. So, I can tell people I was born in Toronto. Or I could say I wass born in Etobicoke. Further confusing matters Canada Post insisted we state we lived in Islington Ontario, a town that had been swallowed up decades earlier. If I hadn't said I was from Toronto I would have confused everyone. Flint, or Toronto, where someone might be able to say, I am from Harlem, or I am from Brooklyn, or I am from Manhattan, and hope the listener would understand what that meant.

You have heard the joke about the guy from an ethnic group where Mothers are portrayed as highly intrusive and overbearing? His mom gave him two shirts for his birthday. And so the next time he went over to her place for dinner he made a point of wearing one of them. When he gets to her place she looks at his shirt and exclaims -- "What! You didn't like the other one?"

Let's be fair to Moore. What if Moore asserted he was from Davison Michigan, not Flint Michigan? If critics are allowd to be that picky, they could just as easily have called it a deceit if Moore had said he was from Davison, not Flint. If you use Mapblast, or similar, you can see that Davison is smaller than Flint, and they directly border one another.

Let's be fair to him, and only hold him to account for actual distortions -- not Kopel's invented ones. -- Geo Swan 16:42, 25 October 2006 (UTC)