What was that about the media not having a liberal bias? For a few months back in 2003, left-wing pundits and authors, reacting to a spate of books documenting the unmistakable leftwardtilt of the country’s prestige media outlets, began putting forth the argument that their side was the one getting the short end of the stick.
Such a hypothesis – advanced most famously by Eric Alterman in a book titled What Liberal Media? – was preposterous even before the start of the Iraq war. Now, however, charity requires a sense of pained embarrassment for those who insist on sustaining the argument in the face of the anti-Bush fever that has defined much of the mainstream media for at least the past twelve months.
No liberal bias? How, then, can one explain the unprece dented publicity given leftist filmmaker Michael Moore’s alleged documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11?” When was the last time journalists fawned over the maker of a piece of political agit prop, interviewing him as if from a position of abject supplication, lovingly running clips from the film designed to present the president as an amalgamation of war criminal and matchless buffoon?
According to an Editor & Publisher survey of 63 daily newspapers that reviewed the film, 56 – or nearly 90 percent – gave “Fahrenheit 9/11” a thumbs-up. Many of the pro-Moore reviewers used their columns to launch attacks of their own on a president who is more despised by the Left than Richard Nixon was in his heyday.
For a good example of a movie reviewer turned political propagandist, one need only consider the hysterics of The New York Observer’s Rex Reed. “Sometimes sarcastic, always funny,” Reed swooned, “Mr. Moore is armed with facts, and he presents them accurately and succinctly.”
Reed writes gushingly of Moore, reserving his apparently bottomless antipathy not only for Bush – whom he characterizes as “a swaggering, bowlegged, grammatically challenged bully” whose cabinet “is beginning to look more like the Third Reich every day” – but for the U.S. military as well.
“Nobody denies that Saddam Hussein was a monster,” writes Reed, “but not the Iraqi women and children who have been “saved” from one villain only to be burned and shot and maimed for life without arms and legs by villains in a different uniform.”
The stunning lack of moral discernment revealed in that sentence is almost enough to draw attention from Reed’s problematic writing style – if “nobody” denies Hussein’s monstrousness, that would include the Iraqi women and children whom Reed pointedly excludes. (For a merciless but nevertheless hilarious dissection of Reed’s grammatical short comings, see John Simon’s 1980 book Paradigms Lost.)
Of course, not all the reviews of “Fahrenheit 9/11” were positive. The most scathing came from the pen of Christopher Hitchens, the brilliant essayist who until recently was an icon of the Left. “To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic,” wrote Hitchens, “would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability.”
Lest one forget amid all the media hoopla just who Michael Moore is, it’s good to take a look at some of the things he’s said in recent months – and then to ask oneself whether his admirers in the media and the Democratic party agree with such thinking.
* “There is no terrorist threat in this country. This is a lie. This is the biggest lie we’ve been told.”
* “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not “insurgents” or “terrorists” or “The Enemy.” They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow – and they will win.”
* “[Americans] are possibly the dumbest people on the planet….Our stupidity is embarrassing.”
* “The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich.”
* “It’s all part of the same ball of wax, right? The oil companies, Israel, Halliburton.”