By Brian Carnell

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

Michael Moore's latest "documentary" may have won the Cannes prize, but in the United States its coming under increasing criticism for one of the hallmarks of most of Moore's work -- a complete disregard for the truth.

Earlier this month, SpinSanity noted that Moore altered footage of an ad run by the Bush/Quayle campaign in the 1992 election.

Moore includes part of the "Revolving Door" ad used to attack Michael Dukakis over Massachusetts furlough program. In the film, viewers see the ad's footage of prisoners leaving a jail with the copy, "Willie Horton released. Then kills again." But as SpinSanity notes, that text is added by Moore (without mentioning the fact to the audience) and is not present in the original ad. In fact, the Bush/Quayle campaign never ran an ad that mentioned Willie Horton directly.

The problem is made doubly worse since Willie Horton didn't kill anyone while out on his furlough. Instead he was convicted of raping a woman.

Presumably Moore will claim that altering his subject like this is simply part of the license he takes as a humorist and the usual suspects will go along with him, but this is really outrageous conduct even for Moore.

Then Forbes piled on outlining what it claims are a number of myths that the film perpetuates.

Chief among those myths is the very title of the film, "Bowling for Columbine." The title refers to early reports that killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attended a bowling class with their classmates on the morning of their spree killing. Moore repeats this claim in the film, but according to police this is a myth -- Harris and Klebold skipped their bowling class that day.

More disturbingly, Forbes alleges that Moore staged another involving a Traverse City, Michigan, bank that offered a gun as a promotional enticement for opening an account. The film shows Moore entering the bank, completing the necessary financial transaction, and walking out with his gun.

But, in fact, according to Forbes the way the promotion worked is that the customer had to buy a long term CD, then go to a local gun shop, fill out paperwork and pass a background check, and then obtain the gun from the gun shop after the necessary waiting period.

Finally, even The American Prospect got in on the act, noting Moore's choice in completely ignoring the racial aspect of American gun crime. In fact, in the film Moore includes a brief interview he did with Charlton Heston in which Heston finally offers that maybe America's ethnic makeup might have something to do with the level of gun crime -- and aspect of gun crime that Moore is completely unwilling to investigate.

Garance Franke-Ruta writes,

My beef with Moore is this: He has managed to make a movie about gun violence in America -- where 53 percent of the gun murder victims are black -- without interviewing a single black victim of gun violence, or even asking black community leaders, who have spent decades successfully trying to combat the problem, for their insights. Instead, to explore a phenomenon that has devastated inner cities and is a horror primarily in urban areas -- nearly 70 percent of gun murders take place in cities, according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics -- Moore has made a movie that takes as its focal point the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., a type of crime (five or more victims) that represented one-tenth of 1 percent of murders that year and that occurred in a white, prosperous, suburban community.

. . .

Though liberals have doubtless cheered this movie in part for focusing on crazy white people with guns instead of the usual stereotypes about violent minorities, there is no way that a movie that so completely elides the devastating impact of gun violence on blacks and cities can arrive at anything like a reasonable portrait of America, let alone a valid conclusion about the causes of gun violence. There is a point at which an effort not to perpetuate offensive stereotypes turns into an impoverishing erasure of the facts.

There are numerous other problems with the film. Moore focuses on Canada, for example, as a country with similar demographics and levels of gun ownership but lower crime rates and no Columbine-style massacres. This thesis is helped out greatly by Moore leaving out Mark Lepine's Dec. 18, 1989 killing spree in which Lepine killed 14 women at a Montreal university before killing himself.

Truth might be stranger than fiction, but fiction is apparently more appealing to Moore.

Sources:

Moore's the Pity: Bowling for Columbine and Michael Moore's urban phobia. Garance Franke-Ruta, The American Prospect, November 22, 2002.

Viewer beware: In "Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore once again puts distortions and contradictions before the truth. Ben Fritz, SpinSanity, November 19, 2002.

Bowl-o-Drama. Daniel Lyons, Forbes, December 9, 2002.

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