http://www.suntimes.com/output/rosenthal/cst-ftr-phil13.html


Who do you believe: us, or Michael Moore?

July 13, 2004

BY PHIL ROSENTHAL TELEVISION CRITIC Advertisement

LOS ANGELES -- When it comes to assessing TV news coverage of the situation in Iraq, much of "Fahrenheit 9/11" is Hindsight 20/20, according to NBC's Tom Brokaw.

Of greater concern to him and other top network newspeople, however, is the sense that some moviegoers consider Michael Moore's film more credible than their own reports.

"My complaint was not with the criticism. I don't complain about anything he has said. My concern is that this not be taken as journalism," ABC "Nightline" host Ted Koppel said Monday. "It is journalism in the sense that an editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times is journalism, but that's opinion journalism. It's a different sort of thing.

"I worry that too many people are going to start taking that as gospel when indeed I know for a fact that there are things in that movie that a little bit of careful reporting could have corrected. But I don't think [Moore] was altogether interested in getting it straight down the middle. He was interested in making a political statement, and he did it very well.

"It's a terrific piece of entertainment. There are even some interesting facts in it, but it is to the documentary what [Oliver Stone's] 'JFK' film was to history."

Brokaw seemed particularly peeved by "9/11." When asked about the film by a West Coast TV critic, he asked if the critic thought Moore's movie to be an accurate portrayal. The critic said yes. "Of what?" Brokaw shot back.

"It's really easy to turn back the clock now and say, 'Oh, it was the fault [of the media], especially of the electronic media, that we went to war because they jumped on the bandwagon,' " Brokaw said. "If you do a fair review, we gave a very vigorous accounting of what was known and what was not known at the time. ... The American news networks and the newspapers, for the most part, did as well as they could under the circumstances."

Citizens, however, may be becoming increasingly wary. ABC's George Stephanopoulos, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, tells of meeting last week with undecided Republican and Democratic voters in Ohio, encountering a handful who had seen "Fahrenheit 9/11."

"What was most striking to me is that when I asked them, 'Why did you go to see it?' they said, 'Because we wanted to get the facts,' " Stephanopoulos said. "There wasn't time to get into a big argument with them ... but at least a few of them had the sense that if it's coming from the government [or] if it's coming from established media, they must not be telling us something and we have to go to this alternative venue to get the facts. I think that's a challenge for all of us."

Part of that challenge stems from the fact that, even when dealing with the same information, there is a big difference between traditional journalism and other sources.

" 'Nightline' is not nearly as entertaining as 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' " Koppel said. "We're never going to be as entertaining as '9/11.' We're never going to be as entertaining as the movie 'JFK.' But there is still, I think, a desperate need for down-the-middle news."

Not everyone agrees, though. More and more people, especially young people, are said to be inclined to seek their news from unconventional sources, such as Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" or Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11."

"I do worry about young people going and seeing that film and seeing it as the gospel," said Brokaw, who is scheduled to step down as anchor of "NBC Nightly News" later this year. "You've all read the various accounts that have been done, by us and by Newsweek and by others, about what was factually incorrect or the liberties that [Moore] took with the facts as he arranged them.

"It is very skillfully done. He's a master at getting his point of view on the big screen. I mean, look, the right has Rush [Limbaugh] and the left has Michael Moore and they are very good at presenting their points of view, saying this is factual. Truth is a little more elusive, and it's the arrangement of those facts."

As for the notion that the film is packed with previously unreported information, ABC "World News Tonight" anchor Peter Jennings said he actually was "surprised by how much of the ground we'd already covered."

"But," Koppel said, "we didn't do those stories as political polemics. And I am concerned on both sides of the political spectrum that if what Americans feel they have to get is news with an attitude, what they're going to end up losing is some of the objectivity that traditionally people in our business have tried at least -- we don't always succeed, but we have tried -- to bring to these stories."

What might irk Brokaw most is that he personally spent time reporting in Iraq before the war to better understand the situation there.

"I had a lot of people come up to me and, quietly, at some risk, say: 'When are the Americans coming? We can't continue to live like this,' " Brokaw said. "And the only scenes we saw in Michael Moore's film ... were children sliding down playground ramps and so on.

"That was not an accurate portrayal. This was one of the most repressive regimes in history. Was it an appropriate excuse to go to war? That's a whole other debate. ... [But] the idea of using Michael Moore's very artful, very strong point of view as some kind of gold standard, I think, is just wholly inappropriate. I really do."