The Village Voice: Nation: Press Clips: Mauling Moore

The Village Voice: Nation: Press Clips: Mauling Moore by Richard Goldstein: "n just one weekend, Fahrenheit 9/11 earned more money than any feature-length documentary in history. This despite a campaign against the film by the White House and its surrogates. Everyone expected George Bush's media shills to go after Moore, but who would have thought Fox News would keep its attack dogs relatively muzzled while ABC and NBC launched remarkably unbalanced attacks.
So far, Fox's main complaint is that Moore won't give them an interview. However, he did allow himself to be interrogated by George Stephanopoulos on ABC's This Week. During that chat, he addressed his critics' major points. Take the fact that Saudi nationals, including members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to leave the United States after 9-11 even though all commercial flights were grounded. Moore implies that the president cleared those flights because of family business ties to the Saudis. But Richard Clarke, the former security adviser - and prominent Bush critic - insists it was he who authorized the flights. When Stephanopoulos brought this up, Moore replied that Clarke's decision had been an error, adding that Clarke has admitted making mistakes 'and he apologized to the 9-11 families for those mistakes.'
Maybe this was an evasion, maybe not; but it certainly constituted a response, and ABC could easily have included it in subsequent news stories about Fahrenheit 9/11. Instead, the network launched a two-pronged attack on the film's accuracy - one that advanced from Good Morning America to World News Tonight - without giving Moore a fair chance to respond to the most damaging claims. Both segments began with the graphic 'Fact or Fiction?' The journalistic equivalent of asking a defendant when he stopped beating his wife. Both relied heavily on Clarke's statem"


by Richard Goldstein