Michael Moore controversies

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

Contents 1 Opinion of Cuban-Americans 2 Roger & Me 3 Bowling for Columbine 3.1 Dave Kopel 3.2 Matt Stone 3.3 Michael Wilson 4 Fahrenheit 9/11 5 Sicko 6 Critical documentary films 7 References

[edit] Opinion of Cuban-Americans

In his 1997 best-selling book Downsize This!, Moore wrote about Miami's Cuban exiles as "always present and involved... in every incident of national torment that has deflated our country for the past three decades," including as examples the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra and the drug-abuse epidemic. Moore has also referred to Cuban exiles as "Batista supporters" and "wimps" who were wrong not to immediately send home child-boater Elián González. Regarding that controversy, Moore called Elián's mother a child abuser for taking the boy to sea.^[1]

[edit] Roger & Me

Moore's body of work has attracted criticism from both conservatives and liberals. 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.^[2][3] 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.^[4] 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."^[4]

[edit] Bowling for Columbine

[edit] Dave Kopel

Dave Kopel made allegations of deceptive editing, staging, or scripting scenes, or altering the original intent of the speaker, about Moore's film Bowling for Columbine in the conservative magazine National Review.^[5] 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,^{[citation needed]} but corrected the text for the DVD release, so that it mirrored actual events.^[6]

[edit] Matt Stone

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, by playing these two completely separate segments consecutively:

We have a very specific beef with Michael Moore. I did an interview, and he didn't mischaracterize me or anything I said in the movie. But what he did do was put this cartoon right after me that made it look like we did that cartoon.^[7]

Though the animation actually appears later on in the film, Stone called it "a good reference to what Michael Moore does in films...he creates meaning where there is none by cutting things together."^[8]

[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.^[9][10] Erik Möller argues that such criticisms obscure the fundamental point: "The bank does exactly what it advertises," he wrote, "It hands out guns from its vault to those who open an account."^[11] He further notes that while Moore's detractors subject his every word to critical examination, potentially damaging counter-criticisms are accepted at face value.

[edit] Fahrenheit 9/11

See also: Fahrenheit 9/11 controversy

Moore set up a rebuttal "war room" to support the content in Fahrenheit 9/11 and counter critics who felt he had been deceptive.^[12]

Ray Bradbury has criticized Moore's adaptation of his Fahrenheit 451 title without permission.^[13]

In May of 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 in Fahrenheit 9/11.^[14] 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.^[15] On March 21, 2008 the First Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed the ruling in Moore's favor.^[16] The Associated Press reported that, in reaction to the ruling, "Moore said years of failed lawsuits against his films show his movies are accurate."^[17]

Moore's work has come under fire from those who assert that when making his films, he unfairly 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".^[18] Slate magazine's Christopher Hitchens also wrote a widely circulated critique of the same film.^[19] These criticisms drew several counter-criticisms^[20] as well as an eFilmCritic article^[21] and a Columbus Free Press editorial.^[22]

[edit] Sicko

See also: Sanjay Gupta

Although Sicko was scheduled to be released on June 29, 2007, the film was leaked onto the Internet in June 2007.^[23] 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.^[24]

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.^[25][26] A duplicate master copy of the film is being held in Canada in case American authorities attempt 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.^[27]

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.^[28] Moore responded to CNN by publishing the results on his homepage.^[29] 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.^[30]

Moore was also 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."^[31]

[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. 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.^[32]

[edit] References