Moore, the war, and the press
I don't know how i missed this one - the dateline is Sunday, May 23 - but it's one of the longest and best reviews of Fahrenheit 9/11 I have seen with some particular emphasis on how the hell Moore manages to portray the war in ways our press has never shown us. Anyway, thanks Kim, for sending it along. Though it comes fom the NYT, it is republished on Common Dreams so the link above will take you to the whole thing whether you can get into the NYT or not.
I urge you to read the whole account - but here's one small sample:
Of course, Mr. Moore is being selective in what he chooses to include in his movie; he's a polemicist, not a journalist. But he implicitly raises the issue that much of what we've seen elsewhere during this war, often under the label of "news," has been just as subjectively edited. Perhaps the most damning sequence in "Fahrenheit 9/11" is the one showing American troops as they ridicule hooded detainees in a holding pen near Samara, Iraq, in December 2003. A male soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same time. Besides adding further corroboration to Seymour Hersh's report that the top command has sanctioned a culture of abuse not confined to a single prison or a single company or seven guards, this video raises another question: why didn't we see any of this on American TV before "60 Minutes II"?
Don Van Natta Jr. of The New York Times reported in March 2003 that we were using hooding and other inhumane techniques at C.I.A. interrogation centers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. CNN reported on Jan. 20, after the Army quietly announced its criminal investigation into prison abuses, that "U.S. soldiers reportedly posed for photographs with partially unclothed Iraqi prisoners." And there the matter stood for months, even though, as we know now, soldiers' relatives with knowledge of these incidents were repeatedly trying to alert Congress and news organizations to the full panorama of the story.
Mr. Moore says he obtained his video from an independent foreign journalist embedded with the Americans. "We've had this footage in our possession for two months," he says. "I saw it before any of the Abu Ghraib news broke. I think it's pretty embarrassing that a guy like me with a high school education and with no training in journalism can do this. What the hell is going on here? It's pathetic.
So perhaps lost in the anti-war, anti-Bush thrust of the picture is another theme about the failings of journalism both explicit and implicit: In Moore's words,"What the hell is going on here." American coverage of this war is indeed pathetic. But then, it took us nearly 40 years to look WWI I in the face with "Saving Private Ryan."
But Michael Moore is not a journalist. He's an event.
No - I haven't seen the movie yet. I have plans to see it Wednesday. But James has - you can read his comments here.
