Movements to muzzle Michael Moore backfire

[never cry wolf]

Clarence Page
Movements to muzzle Michael Moore backfire


Published June 27, 2004

WASHINGTON -- When a TV reporter asked filmmaker Michael Moore whether his controversial documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" was only "preaching to the choir," Moore's response was right on point:

"Well," he said, "it's good to give the choir something to sing."

Moore's choir was in full-throated attendance when he recounted that story to big applause at his film's glittery Washington premiere Wednesday night. A Republican was about as hard to find in that red-carpet parade as a chicken at a fox convention. I suspect audiences for Moore's stinging look at how the Bush administration got us into Iraq will draw similarly partisan crowds, along with some of the slim sliver of people who have not yet made up their minds about to whom they will give their presidential vote.

That's OK, because the point of Moore's decidedly anti-Bush movie is not to brainwash someone into shifting from one political side to another. Rather, as film director Spike Lee said at the movie's New York opening, "The point is that people come out of the theater talking and discussing what they just saw."

Indeed, as the late media guru Marshall McLuhan once said, propaganda ends where dialogue begins. Michael Moore's documentaries like "Roger & Me" and "Bowling for Columbine" are hits precisely because they are not objective. A lot of conservative radio talk-show hosts could say the same. Like the radio talkers, Moore's movies are the big-screen version of what op-ed columnists or editorial cartoonists do in newspapers.

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