In a post that rightly excoriates apparent Surgeon General nominee Sanjay Gupta for his feckless fact-checking of Michael Moore's Sicko, Ezra Klein acts as if journalists are being unreasonable in scrutinizing Moore's work closely:
Begin with this: Michael Moore makes journalists lose their mind. They have an almost compulsive need to prove him wrong.
Similarly, Paul Krugman attributes Gupta's report to "Village behavior":
What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right.
Reading Klein and Krugman, one would think that journalists routinely scrutinize Moore's work. However, as Ben Fritz and I wrote last year in a column about the debate over Sicko, the reality is that Moore has always been an "uncouth" "outsider" yet his work drew very little mainstream scrutiny for years. Moreover, Fritz, our Spinsanity colleague Bryan Keefer, and I documented an extensive range of inaccuracies, errors, and distortions in Moore's previous work, including his films "Bowling for Columbine" and "Fahrenheit 9/11" and his books "Stupid White Men" and "Dude, Where's My Country?". As Fritz and I argued, "[w]hile "Sicko" may not have any major factual errors, we shouldn't let Moore (or anyone else) whitewash his many problems with the truth."
What? I think you are trying to make this about a larger issue with Moore than it really is. I don't think people condemning Gupta for his stupid fact check are then required to take on the burden of praising or scrutinizing the whole of Moore's career.
Posted by: glena | January 08, 2009 at 03:27 PM
I disagree. Ezra isn't complaining that it's wrong for journalists to scrutinize Moore's work. He's complaining that they don't actually fact check Moore at all. Instead Moore is being judged on his reputation, so the fact-checkers found fault where there was none.
Posted by: Jinchi | January 08, 2009 at 05:30 PM
My guess is that Moore received little scrutiny for years precisely because he was regarded as an uncouth non-Villager: he was deemed unworthy of attention.
I don't have a problem with Village journalists fact checking Moore, but I do wish they'd fact check themselves first. Or better yet, check their own writing against professional standards. It's a bit much for the Villager journalists who failed to cover the Bush administration with any degree of critical judgement,or covered in a faux equivalence, fact impaired "hesaid/she said" way, to get
all anal with Moore.
Moore, after all, doesn't claim to be a journalist. He's a propandgandist. He doesn't pretend to be unbiased.
Posted by: wonkie | January 11, 2009 at 08:08 AM