The Nation: Moore 1, Media 0

Moore 1, Media 0: "had a swell time at Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's documentary about George Bush's dubious progress from Florida to Iraq. It's his best movie--funny, heartbreaking, outraged and outrageous--and deserves its huge success. When did you last see a muckraking expos of events that are still unfolding? The film should make the media blush for its torpor and fake judiciousness and embedment with the Administration. Moore displays footage never before seen of events most Americans know nothing about, unless they read The Nation, because the media haven't told them. Did you know, for example, that the Congressional Black Caucus could not get a single Democratic senator to lend the required signature to its formal protest of the certification of Bush's victory in 2000? Did you know Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador, dined with Bush on September 13, 2001, the day before flights began that would carry more than a hundred Saudis out of the country, including dozens of members of the extended bin Laden family? Have you seen wounded and dead Iraqis on TV, or interviews with mutilated soldiers, disillusioned soldiers--or with parents of dead GIs? If Joe Darby hadn't jump-started the Abu Ghraib scandal with those photos, you might well be seeing the brutalization of Iraqi prisoners for the first time in a brief scene in Fahrenheit 9/11. "


by Katha Pollitt
The Nation